Censorship in Saudi Arabia

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Censorship in Saudi Arabia is prevalent in the press and with internet access.

In 2007 Reporters Without Borders ranked Saudi Arabia 148th out of 169 countries for freedom of the press.

Internet

Saudi Arabia directs all international Internet traffic through a proxy farm located in King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology. Content filter is implemented there, based on software by Secure Computing.^[1] Additionally, a number of sites are blocked according to two lists maintained by the Internet Services Unit (ISU) ^[2]: one containing "immoral" (mostly pornographic) sites, the other based on directions from a security committee run by the Ministry of Interior (including sites critical of the Saudi government). An interesting feature of this system is that citizens are encouraged to actively report "immoral" sites for blocking, using a provided web form, which reads like this:

Dear User, عفواً، الموقع المطلوب غير متاح. Sorry, the requested page is unavailable. إن كنت ترى أن هذه الصفحة ينبغي أن لا تُحجب تفضل بالضغط هنا. If you believe the requested page should not be blocked please click here. لمزيد من المعلومات عن خدمة الإنترنت في المملكة العربية السعودية، يمكنك زيارة الموقع التالي: For more information about internet service in Saudi Arabia, please click here: www.internet.gov.sa

The legal basis for contents filtering is the resolution by Council of Ministers dated 12 February 2001 ^[3]. According to a study carried out in 2004 by the OpenNet Initiative: The most aggressive censorship focused on pornography, drug use, gambling, religious conversion of Muslims, and filtering circumvention tools.^[1]

However, Saudi Arabia has been noted^[4] to also actively block and filter access to "politically astray" and other websites that the government deems inappropriate.

References

External links

• Internet censorship in Saudi Arabia by Reporters Without Borders
• Report by Harvard University's Law School on Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia

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