Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia in 2004

A. Summary
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia controls the information its citizens can readily access on the World Wide Web through a sophisticated filtering system that draws upon commercial software from the United States (Secure Computing's SmartFilter) for technical implementation and site blocking suggestions, expert local staff for operations and additional site identification, and Saudi citizen input to suggest over- or under-blocking according to stated filtering criteria. The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has tested filtering in Saudi Arabia over a three-year period. We found that the Kingdom's filtering focuses on a few types of content: pornography (98% of these sites tested blocked in our research), drugs (86%), gambling (93%), religious conversion, and sites with tools to circumvent filters (41%). In contrast, Saudi Arabia shows less interest in sites on gay and lesbian issues (11%), politics (3%), Israel (2%), religion (less than 1%), and alcohol (only 1 site). Unlike filtering in states such as China, the policies, procedures, and philosophy for Saudi Arabia's filtering system are relatively transparent and documented on the Web site of its Internet Services Unit (ISU). Users who try to access forbidden sites see a Web page informing them that the site is prohibited. Despite this openness about filtering, the system inevitably errs, resulting in overblocking of unrelated content