IP: New Project: Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia (fwd)

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Mon Jul 15 13:11:01 PDT 2002


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 17:08:05 -0400
From: David Farber <dfarber at earthlink.net>
To: ip-sub-1 at majordomo.pobox.com
Subject: IP: New Project: Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia


-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Edelman <edelman at law.harvard.edu>
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 14:28:46 
To: dave at farber.net
Subject: New Project: Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and I have been studying Internet filtering in
multiple countries worldwide ([1]), and we released today our first
investigation in this series.

In recent testing, we designed software to connect to the Internet through
proxy servers in Saudi Arabia, and we subsequently attempted to access
approximately 60,000 Web pages as a means of empirically determining the
scope and pervasiveness of Internet filtering there.  Saudi-installed
filtering systems prevented access to certain requested Web pages; we
tracked a total of 2,038 blocked pages.  Such pages contained information
about religion, health, education, reference, humor, and entertainment.
Specific blocked sites include the Women in American History section of
Encyclopedia Britannica Online (women.eb.com), the Rolling Stone Magazine
(rollingstone.com), Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
(religioustolerance.org), and the ivillage.com Women's Network, among
hundreds of others.

We conclude that the Saudi government maintains an active interest in
filtering non-sexually explicit Web content for users within the Kingdom. We
also find that substantial amounts of non-sexually explicit Web content is
in fact effectively inaccessible to most Saudi Arabians.  Finally, we note
that much of this content consists of sites that are popular elsewhere in
the world.

Our full report, along with a listing of specific blocked web pages, is
available at
   <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia/>



Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/



References:

[1] "Documentation of Internet Filtering Worldwide"
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/>


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