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Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia/

Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia

Jonathan Zittrain* and Benjamin Edelman**

Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Harvard Law School

Abstract: The authors connected to the Internet through proxy servers in Saudi Arabia and 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; the authors tracked 2,038 blocked pages. Such pages contained information about religion, health, education, reference, humor, and entertainment. See highlights of blocked pages. The authors conclude (1) that the Saudi government maintains an active interest in filtering non-sexually explicit Web content for users within the Kingdom; (2) that substantial amounts of non-sexually explicit Web content is in fact effectively inaccessible to most Saudi Arabians; and (3) that much of this content consists of sites that are popular elsewhere in the world.

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