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Saudi Arabia's 'Great Firewall'
securitas writes: "We've all heard about The Great Firewall of China (see this Wired feature) but many don't know about Saudi Arabia's version of the same. The New York Times reports on the challenges and problems of filtering the Internet for an entire nation. San Jose's Secure Computing has the contract but may lose it when it comes up for renewal next year."
Do you know what warcrimes were done in Afghanistan by US troops, if any? I don't, since this information is held from me. Number of innocent casualties? same. Proof of Bin Laden's guilt? withheld too. The US is just as guilty as China or Saudi-Arabia in this one.. all do censorship, all present their government's opinion as authoritive.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
We're forgetting one thing here when we make a big deal about this. Do they care that much? Saudi Arabia is a religious country, and this firewall is to filter out things that go against their religious views. While this may be just unthinkable for us, they may have little or no problem with this.
I've talked to my suitemate that is from Saudi Arabia and he's told me some things about it. It seems that it there are people that watch the sites go through. They go to each site manually and check it out. This means that you may get through once, but after then, don't count on it being there. Also, they aren't dumb. They have filtered out sites like Yahoo! groups, anonymizer, and Safeweb (RIP) because they were used in large for pornography. Another interesting tidbit was that the first thing he did when he got on the net in the US was go to www.sex.com and was blown away. He knew it existed, but has never been able to go there.
I know there is other material that is being filtered besides pornography, but porn makes up the majority. Is that SO bad? Think about how any religion may feel about pornography, and if they were running the government, wouldn't censorship be expected? I'm not talking about religious people running the government, I'm talking about the government and the religion being one.
See my other post. The US doesn't think the Saudis are nice. They are better than the Taliban but not by much. However, the regime does not support terrorism and is cooperative with the international community in general. Furthermore the regime is far more progressive than the regime that would result if the Al Saud family were thrown out of power. I would be terribly inclined to see a democracy in Saudi Arabia, but like many people whose education consists primarily of fundamentalist religious indoctrination, I don't know if the people would naturally form a democracy when the government fell. Much more likely an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship like the Taliban. I.e. substantially worse than the current Saudi government, openly supportive of anti-western terrorist organizations, etc.