Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
''reliable'' every time he was mentioned. More recently, those seeking to avoid
government censorship can download software designed to help them do so, such
as the Canadian ''censorship circumvention'' program Psiphon.
3.2.6 Middle East
In most of the Arab world, the media are closely monitored and controlled by
governments, either through laws and regulations or via direct ownership in state
monopolies (Warf and Vincent
2007
). Cyber-journalists, editors, and bloggers may
face penalties for ''slighting the Islamic faith,'' blaspheming government officials,
promoting political change, or advocating ''immoral behavior''. Arab governments
typically excuse their censorship on the grounds that they are protecting Islamic
values and morality. Sometimes this justification is linked to an alleged onslaught
of Western decadence against Islamic values (Fandy
1999
). Offensive sites gen-
erally are held to include pornography, homosexuality, drugs, gambling, and
atheism. However, like autocratic regimes the world over, many Arab govern-
ments are afraid of their citizens having access to any substantive political
information about the outside world. Censorship may also generate profits for the
government, including limited potential access of customers to rivals of state-
owned telecommunications companies. Nonetheless, despite these restrictions, the
internet has opened myriad spaces of Arab political debate that transcend national
boundaries (Ghareeb
2000
).
Censorship in the Arab world is most acute in Saudi Arabia. Public access to the
internet in the kingdom was made possible only when the state deemed that it
could effectively control it; the entire internet backbone network is state-owned.
Thus, while the kingdom has sought to garner the economic benefits of the web, it
has also strenuously tried to prevent it from challenging the highly conservative
basis of its rule (Teitelbaum
2002
). The Saudi state has erected extensive firewalls
to control the flow of digital information. Saudi internet cafes are required to
record the names of the customers and the times they arrive and depart, infor-
mation that must be delivered to state security upon request; persons under 18 are
forbidden unless accompanied by an adult. By royal decree, the King Abdul Aziz
City for Science and Technology (KACST), a government-owned research center,
is the only portal through which ISPs can make international connections
(
www.unesco.org/webworld
). This mechanism operates using commercial soft-
ware produced in the United States, Secure Computing's SmartFilter (Lee
2001
),
which has also been sold to and utilized by the governments of Iran, Yemen,
Tunisia, the U.A.E., and Sudan (Villeneuve
2006
). Requests from Saudi ISPs to
access the outside world must pass through state-controlled servers. According to
the OpenNet Initiative (
2004
), in 2004 more than 400,000 web pages were banned
by the Saudi regime (about 2.2 % of all sites tested in a sample), the vast bulk of
which pertained to adult material but also including some games, recreational
sites, on-line shopping, Yahoo, America On-Line, and even medical websites that
