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Censorship Your Rights Online

U.S. Company Helps Saudi Arabia Censor The Net 26

Posted by timothy from the or-the-next-bidder-steps-in dept.
John writes: "Saudi Arabia blocks its citizens' internet access to some sites on pornography, religious information (including some on the state religion: Islam) humor, music, movies, and homosexuality, and programs that translate web pages into Arabic, according to this Boston Globe article. (Secure Computing Corp.) provides the Saudis with Smartfilter to block network of proxy servers. The article does not describe the criteria used to block various cites. I wonder if Slashdot is one of them?" Update: 07/17 15:02 GMT by T : A brief mention ran yesterday at the Censorware Project as well, linking to the referenced report itself.
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U.S. Company Helps Saudi Arabia Censor The Net More

U.S. Company Helps Saudi Arabia Censor The Net

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  • Yeah, and? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jedwards ( 135260 )

    US companies make all sorts of things that other countries buy.

    One could mention bombs, but that's probably a bit emotional for someone upset by a software company selling software.

  • Hardly news (Score:3, Insightful)

    by j-turkey ( 187775 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @11:03AM (#3901623) Homepage
    Although it is ugly, this practice is hardly news...US companies have been helping countries censor their internet (and do other bad shit with our technology) for decades Cisco's Great Firewall of China is a perfect example...also, yahoo China is another great example [slashdot.org] of this type of censorship (I'm not gonna serach for the Cisco firewall link again -- but its out there in the Slashdot archives) .

    Let's also not forget about IBM's assistance to Nazi Germany during WWII -- cataloging and tracking all of the people that the Nazi's wanted to do away with was a monumental task, and IBM was right there to assist.

    Although assisting Nazi Germany does not necessarily equate to firewalling China, or censoring Saudi Arabia, what I'm saying is that US companies have always been willing to take on less-than-honorable causes in order to earn a buck...because if they don't do it, their competitor will. Didn't everyone already know this?


    -Turkey

  • Oh, yes, this is news (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bouncings ( 55215 ) <.moc.redniknek. .ta. .nek.> on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @11:13AM (#3901707) Homepage
    Let's see. The American government helps other nations:
    • Put down opposition parties
    • Solidify military control
    • Exploit their workforces through low-wage jobs
    • Censor virtually everything else
    And now we're all terrible shocked that American firms are being used in the development of censorware for a foreign government? I'm surprised the DOD isn't bankrolling the ENTIRE project.
    • Do you really believe that DOD has a vested interest in seeing Saudi Arabia block internet access to porn, religious information, humor, music, movies, homosexuality, and web translators? I don't know a ton about this, so I could be wrong -- but it would seem that DOD would want the opposite.

      I'm curious -- from your post, you seem to believe that DOD is funding some portion of this? Which parts, and why would they want to do that?

      Also -- how does the US government help censor anything in any country other than in the US? Are you talking about DMCA-type stuff? (I'm legitimately curious -- not being a Slashdot bastard).


      Thanks
      -Turkey
  • And now I have this list of 2000+ potentially very interesting sites to explore, with the added pleasure that Saudians are denied access to them !
  • Both Peekabooty [peek-a-booty.org] and Triangle Boy [safeweb.com] promised a distributed solution to this kind of Net censorship, but Peekabooty doesn't look like it's ready for prime time and Safeweb appear to have shut down the project (dead link to "project with Voice of America"). Is there a viable project that I can install that will do the same anti-censorship job?
  • One of the most important goals of
    our commercial sector is to generate
    revenue. From prostitution to selling
    of bunk software, they'll do it anyway
    they can, so this story shouldn't surprise
    anyone. In fact, it's really not even a story.

    The only thing that makes this "slashdot worthy"
    is the fact that it's our companies promoting
    censorship, which red-blooded Americans view
    as a tatic of the Reds.

    Bear in mind, however, that not all countries,
    or citizens of those countries, agree with this.
    Morever, some countries can, literally, collapse
    when a new and unfamiliar system is imposed.
    For a good example of this, look at what happened
    to Russia when they dabled briefly in capitalism.

  • Gosh hard to imagine. (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheGeneration ( 228855 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @11:42AM (#3901982) Journal
    Gosh it's hard to imagine a company which works so hard to please the Christian Right here in the USA would be able to find similarities in the Islamic Right.

    I know... I know... it's just crazy to think that the Christian Right and the Islamic Right hold very similar view points on opression.
  • Capitalist law can be pretty harsh.

    Corporations are required by their bylaws to make as much money as possible. By any means possible.

    If it were legal to mug people, they would. They would have to. If it were legal to sell child porn, they would. They would have to.

    One exception.
    They won't do it if they think that the public support that they would lose is greater than the profits that they would gain. Corporations do not wish to shoot themselves in the foot to make a buck.

    Which is exactly why we should make a big stink about this.

    If we let them get away with it, they'll keep doing it. They have to.

    But if we bitch and moan and whine and complain and boycott, they'll consider these projects to be shooting themselves in the foot.

    That is, if we have money.
  • This is taken from the Saudi Internet Services Unit [isu.net.sa] Content Filtering pages:

    "Blocking the sites by ISU follows a specific policy, it had been stated by the government institutions responsible for introducing the service in Saudi Arabia.

    "Pursuant to the Council of Ministers' decree concerning the regulation of use of the Internet in Saudi Arabia, all sites that contain content in violation of Islamic tradition or national regulations shall be blocked. A security committee chaired by the Ministry of Interior was formulated. One of the tasks assigned to this committee is the selection of sites to be blocked and the oversight of this process. However, due to the wide-spread and diverse nature of pornographic sites, KACST was commissioned to directly block these types of sites. Other non-pornographic sites are only blocked based upon direct requests from the security bodies within the government. KACST has no authority in the selection of such sites and it's role is limited to carrying out the directions of these security bodies."

    The Berkman Ceter study [harvard.edu] was done with the cooperation of the Saudi ISU and reported nothing particularly surprising for anyone using commercial software: lots of pornographic sites were blocked, sites they no doubt added were blocked, some other sites that might be otherwise harmless (although not necessarily by Saudi standards) are blocked, and no particular conclusions can be drawn from the types of sites that are (possibly) inadvertantly blocked. [Slashdot is not one of them, according to the study.]

    If nothing else, studies like this should help those of us in more permissive countries like the United States in demonstrating that depending on filtering as a technological cure-all has flaws.

    I would like to think that the SISU is looking at the list of blocked sites and saying "hey--we didn't mean to block that" and contacting their vendor. Even their home page has an unblocking request form.

    Is there something wrong here?
  • I spent 93 through 2000 working in Saudi and when we were finally able to get on the net, it quickly became a game with most of us to see just what sites we could get into. We also found that the blocking just wasn't consistant. One day we weren't able to get into a site and then the next week, we could get into just about any site that we wanted to. One thing that did surprise me was that Amnesty International's site was never blocked.
  • maybe all our internet access is censored....
  • A company has to do business. Although it seems wrong to me that a country would want to censor the Internet, it is also not right for an American business to deny them service because the principles of the corporation differ from the principles of the country. They're simply doing what they do for a living, and they cannot be held responsible for the way in which their products are used.

    Admittedly, however, this is a difficult distinction to make: when does it become wrong to supply one's products to another person, country, group, etc in the name of morals? IBM sold census machines to Nazi Germany, because IBM machines could provide the best means to Nazi ends. Was that wrong of them? Is this company then wrong as well? I think it's very difficult to say.

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