RIYADH, 6 July 2003 — In a move to increase control over those who use public Internet cafes in the Kingdom, the country’s security bodies have been told by the government to remind café owners about the strict laws regarding the monitoring of those they allow to access the Net.
A list of recently revised regulations, a copy of which was seen by Arab News, has been distributed to all the Kingdom’s Internet cafés, with the advisory that they must be implemented without exception.
A new regulation states that all Internet café customers should surrender their ID cards so that their names and ID numbers can be written down. The time at which the user logged onto the Net and the logoff time are also to be recorded, and all this information must be filed by the café for six months and released to the authorities, if requested.
The decision was made by the authorities after they learned that many Internet cafés in the country were not abiding by existing regulations. Also in May, several individuals suspected of having links to terrorism were arrested in a raid on an Internet café in Madinah. They are believed to have used the Net to keep in touch with other terrorists. The alleged mastermind of the May 12 Riyadh bombings, Ali AbduL Rahaman Al-Faqaasi Al-Ghamdi, posted letters on Islamist websites while on the run, denying knowledge of the attacks but praising those who carried them out.
The regulations distributed to Internet café owners are as follows:
— Users must be informed of fines and possible imprisonment for those who violate these regulations.
— Users under 18 are not allowed to access the Internet. Exceptions will be made for those accompanied by their guardians and for trainees and students in computer science. Those in charge of trainees and computer centers will be held fully responsible for any misuse of computers by those under 18.
— Public places will be held fully responsible for any failure to identify a person who has violated these conditions or for any misuse of their equipment.
— Users must be guided to use the Internet in a positive manner that is consistent with Islamic teachings and government laws. They should avoid anything that infringes on the regulations for public Internet usage which include: Material that violates Islamic Shariah in principle or in fact as well as anything that abuses the sacredness of Islam and its teachings; material used to exchange information, either sending or receiving, that contradicts Islam or Saudi government laws; material that runs counter to public security; material that propagates destructive ideas or the spread of anything that might be a danger to public order or that might lead to disunity among citizens; material that advocates crime, calls for it or stimulates it in any way as well as anything that advocates an assault or attack on others in any form and material that involves the exploitation of individuals.
Meanwhile, a study of Internet filtering in the Kingdom conducted by two professors of the Harvard Law School reveals that the Kingdom maintains an active interest in filtering non-sexually explicit websites for Internet users.
More than 95 percent of some 400,000 blocked websites are claimed by monitoring authorities to deal with pornography and the rest contain political and social subjects that violate the Kingdom’s laws and regulations.
With the Kingdom’s blocking rate set to reach 86 percent, Internet service is being closely monitored and undesirable sites are blocked by a proxy server operated by the Internet Service Unit (ISU) at the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), the study explained.
KACST operates the high-speed data links that connect the country to the international Internet and works rigorously to block sites which can be of interest to Internet users in Saudi Arabia, said the study by Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman, assistant professors of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School.
In addition to detailing Saudi blocking of sexually explicit content, the ISU website lists as bannable “pages related to drugs, bombs, alcohol, gambling and religion or Saudi laws and regulations.”
Referring to the study, the professors said that “the list of all blocked sites was not made available so it is impossible to estimate the total number of pages and the amount of materials blocked or otherwise inaccessible. “Having requested some 64,557 distinct web pages and found 2038 to be blocked, we conclude that Saudi Arabia blocks a range of web content beyond that which is sexually explicit. We found blocking of 76 pages within Yahoo’s humor categories, 70 within music categories and 43 within movies and so on. Taken as a whole, the ISU’s stated blocking criteria are quite broad, making it difficult to assess whether the blocking of a given site is consistent with the criteria,” said the professors.
They added that the majority of blocked health pages on the Internet includes information about specific diseases, treatment and prevention methods. Some of them describe mental health, abortion and precautions during this period, other aspects of women’s health, illegal drugs and their effects on the human body. Other banned sites include those with information about women, humor sites, entertainment and Middle Eastern politics.
The professors said, however, that “since this study about the blocked pages is not and can not be representative of content blocked in Saudi Arabia, it is difficult to draw sweeping conclusions about the Saudi blocking system.”
The blocked web pages, nonetheless, cover a wide variety of substantive areas.
— Additional input by Ghazanfar Ali Khan
