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."

Comments

Should / Can

[JJ]

Should the Saudi government be allowed to do this? Absolutely, there is no inalienable right to Internet access. On the other hand, I think it about as dumb an idea as there is to do it. Denying anyone free access to other peoples ideas is not beneficial to your citizens. At least if you are hoping they develop into thinking people. Of course, both the Saudi and Chinese governments seem not to have that in mind.

Re:Should / Can

[JWhitlock]

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.

Ah, but in the U.S., I can look at contraversial religious websites, websites that criticize Islam (and my own religion) , porn [do you really need a link?], and pretty much anything I want. Even when someone says I can't look at some information, I can look at it, and they can take me to court, and see if a judge thinks their concerns are more important then free speech.

I'm getting sick of these sophmoric statements of "the U.S. is just as bad as [x]", where x is the criminal of the day. Part of my discomfort is because I recently had the same frame of mind, and I hate seeing others make the same mistakes.

Why would we know of U.S. warcrimes in Afghanistan? The Taliban kicked all the foriegn journalists out. Sure, we don't see all the evidence against Bin Laden, but few dispute that his organization trained Islamic radicals, and was probably behind other terrorist acts as well as Sep. 11. I would be angry if we were putting him on trial without enumerating evidence, but first we need to imprison him based on the evidence we have.

Yeah, the U.S. government used propaganda and spin control and even lies, just like every other government on earth. But we also have a free and active press, which is always trying to catch the government lying. Sure, the big media is all corporate controlled and puts the rich white man spin on everything, but there's plenty of other news outlets, and almost every large city I've been in has a newspaper whose sole reason for existance seems to be to criticize the big media paper in town. Afghanistan? No free press. Saudi Arabia? No real free press.

This is a country where three little letters seperate propaganda from porn from anti-propaganda, and there's nothing George W., Time Warner/AOL, or Microsoft can do to stop it. And when they try, we can eventually beat 'em in court.

Re:Should / Can

[Fnkmaster]

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.

Enduring Freedom

[jdfox]

To critics of the sale of content filters, software company executives say that they are only providing politically neutral tools. "Once we sell them the product, we can't enforce how they use it," said Matthew Holt, a sales executive for Secure Computing (news/quote), of San Jose, Calif., that currently provides Internet-filtering software to the Saudi government under a contract that expires in 2003.

What a fine way to salve the conscience: "Once we sell them the product, we can't enforce how they use it." They're happy enough to take the money, just as IBM was happy to take the money from the Nazis for Jew-tracking systems, since no IBMers were actually involved in killing anyone.

US corporate and government support for this brutal dicatorship is a disgrace. Both GOP and Dem administrations are happy to allow trade with this vile regime to thrive as long as it pays, just as they were happy to arm and support Iraq as long as it paid, and just as they continue to profit handsomely from deals with China.

It still amazes me how Bush and pals can talk without a trace of irony about how they are fighting one gov't or another in defense of Freedom and Justice, then turn around and support the Saudis. Will Laura Bush be arguing passionately for the rights of Saudi women anytime soon? Of course she will, as soon as the pro-Western govt gets thrown out, and they transform overnight into America's Eternal Foe.

Re:Enduring Freedom

[Fnkmaster]

If you could operate a nation under purely idealist moral principles, then you would be right. We shouldn't deal with the Saudis because they don't adhere to our code of moral conduct. The going theory for a long time is that we HAVE to support the Saudis because all of the alternatives possible in Saudi Arabia are so much worse than the Al Saud family that it would be a terrible event for 1) America 2) Western Civilization as a whole if they were to fall from power.

While I'd like to see a nice democratic government in Saudi Arabia too, the reality is that a large minority in their country is made up of radical Wahabi muslims who are fomenting rebellion in Saudi Arabia (and it's not a nice democratic government they want to form, I assure you). These people are partially responsible for the spread of fundamentalist Wahabi-style Islam around the Islamic world. Watch the PBS Frontline documentary that aired on Friday if you can find it showing again - it gave some fabulous insights into this process.

The moral is that it's not just black and white. It's hard to run around playing favorites in the world and figuring out who is good and who is bad for their own people. It's substantially easier to figure out who is good and bad for your own nation-state, and that's how most countries conduct foreign policy. Honestly, in a lot of ways, I feel bad for the Al Saud family. They can't really modernize the country any more which needs to be done before democratization is an option, because so many of the people seem to be rabidly against modernization. On the other hand, they have fundamentalist clerics and radicals who desperately oppose all attempts at modernization. They have handed greater power to these groups as part of their attempt to broker a peaceful "middle-ground". They have in turn alienated all the liberal academics and others. They look at what happened to Iran under the Shah, and I don't think they want to be the Shah.

Just my 2 cents. I have no good solution to the Saudi problem, it's actually substantially harder to solve than the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which in the end is motivated mostly by economic concerns and nationalism and can be easily solved via some redistricting, establishment of a Palestinian nation, and economic aid to the Palestinians (well, it can be easily solved if you get the two sides to stop shooting for long enough, and you throw out the radicals on both sides who oppose any middle ground solutions).

You can't really do much to fight fundamentalism other than start with young children and make sure they get a proper secular education. This doesn't eliminate fundamentalism, but it greatly reduces its hold. We should make be funding public education programs in Pakistan and other countries dominated by fundamentalist madrassahs as the only option for education, not to mention food and clothing for young children whose parent can't afford to raise them. And as for the Saudis themselves, maybe we should let the Al Saud family fall, but there better be contingency plans and a UN peacekeeping force ready to go in and force democracy at gunpoint because it won't just happen magically.

It's perception, not reality...

[iworm]

I was the Engineering Manager of the third (two others beat us by a few days!) ISP to operate in the Kingdom.

Yes, the filtering is more or less as described. They used to have, maybe still do, an option on the "blocking" page where you could ask that a blocked URL be unblocked, since it was actually something innocuous (of course whether your view that Cindy's Sin Palace etc was innocuous might be disputed by those in charge... :-))

The article also points out that Saudi's can (and do) simply dial up ISPs in neighboring countries to get the access they desire. Equally, rich individuals (they've got a few...) and companies can also make use of satellite access (illegal, but very common).

So, if a Saudi really wants to access porn or political stuff he/she can do so very easily. And therein lies the key to much about Saudi laws: it's not the reality that matters, but appearances.

The Saudi government plays a precarious balancing act, and needs to keep the religious extremists content ("Look we've blocked all the porn") while trying to drag their society into the modern world (where, so I'm told, the Internet is mandatory). Of course balancing acts never work for ever, and one day you fall off, but that's going offtopic.

Do THEY care?

[Slayback]

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.

Censorship - personal experience

[kptBlaha]

In this country (Czech Republic), communists censored everything. Many books were banned, all photocopiers were registered, Radio Free Europe was jammed etc. It did not work. People who wanted to get the books got the books. People who wanted to listen to RFE hacked sophisticated antenas and filters. We copied books using typewritters and Sinclair computers. During the WWII this country was occupied by Nazi Germany. Germans removed SW band from all receivers. People who were caught listening BBC or radio Moscow were executed. Nevertheless many people listened. You cannot stop one's desire of freedom.

Re:Censorship isn't practical on the net

[Bobo the Space Chimp]

If what they're saying is true, that a US company is participating in limiting free speech in other countries, I've thought of some ad slogans for them:

"San Jose Secure Computing -- Participating In The Oppression Of People For Over Eight Years"

"Need To Oppress Your People? -- Call San Jose Secure Computing"

"Indiginous Population Learning Too Much? -- Call San Jose Secure Computing"

"What Is 'Truth', Anyway? Call San Jose Secure Computing, Now With New Under Your Thumb(TM) Technology!"