At the Berkman Center this afternoon, the lunch-time topic was countries that block access to particular sites. We heard about the Berkman’s study of Saudi Arabia’s practices.

Jonathan Zittrain helped start the project when he realized that many people assume that if you could overcome the economic obstacles to global access, everyone would magically be on line. But even when the connection is there, countries are imposing limitations on what can be accessed. The project checks what’s being filtered by the local ISPs. The study began in 2000 and is being done in conjunction with U of Toronto and U of Cambridge. Jeff Engerman, a student Fellow at the Center, gave the presentation.

Before allowing access, the Saudi government did a three year study of public access beginning in 1994, and then spent two years building a firewall. Public access began in 1999. All traffic runs through central government servers and outbound urls are chaecked against a government-specified blacklist. (See here for the policy statement about filtering.) Users can request a block; apparently, about 200 requests are made per day, 30% of which are accepted. About 3% of requests to unblock are implemented.

The requests to block pages outnumber the number of blocked pages, which Saudi officials take as a sign of public support. One newspaper reported 45% of Saudis think there’s too much blocking, 41% think it’s reasonable, and 14% want more. People sell hacked access to blocked sites for around $50 — it’s done through open proxies. (The Chinese, on the other hand, don’t just use a blacklist but look for strings, etc., to dynamically determine the acceptability of content.)

The project found the 98% of the porn sites they checked were blocked, 93% of gambling, 65% of drugs (marijuana 74%, but not treatment sites (5%)), and 41% of the proxies used to skirt around the filters.

For religious sites, 0.7% were blocked, 12% of Bahai were blocked, 5% of Islam, 1% of Scientology, and 0% of Judaism, Christianity and Catholicism.

5% of pages about Israel/Palestine were blocked, 8% on terrorism, the MEMRI list of Islamist websites 29%, gay/lesbian/bisexual 11%, Holocaust 11%, Israel 0%.

There are also blocks on conversion of Muslims to Christianity (e.g., members.aol.com/alnour, arabicbible.com and mutenasserin.org), women’s rights, other Islamic sects.

The “vice” sites are blocked through SmartFilter, a commercially-available filter. There are plenty of anomalies and many cases that are hard to understand: the human rights site www.homa.org is blocked by SmartFilter as nudity, possibly because it has photos of a naked woman showing wounds. SmartFilter’s participation makes it difficult to judge which sites are being targeted. For example, SmartFilter puts Holocaust sites in its “violence” category. Take out the Holocaust sites blocked by SF and the number specifically picked out by the government drops dramatically.

There is some political filtering, including miraserve.com and saudiinstitute.com.

Saudi Arabia’s inconsistent blocking seems to indicate that it’s doing it in part to satisfy internal critics, although they are quite aggressive blocking porn. China, on the other hand, is all bite and no bark.

Fascinating session.

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