RIYADH, 4 December 2007 — The need for government bodies in the Kingdom to be linked electronically; giving Saudi women the opportunity to work in the intelligence field; and government bodies adopting secretive policies to keep their information hidden from the public eye were some of the topics raised by speakers at the final day of the Informational Technology & National Security (ITNS) conference here yesterday.
Speaking at the conference, Prince Muhammad ibn Saud Al-Saud, general manager of the Information Center at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the working environment in the Kingdom was secretive, which resulted in many public sectors falling behind on information technology development. “There have been initiatives to deem certain information as ‘secretive’, which is not for public display,” he said, adding that many specialists believed that such a perception hindered progress in IT in the public sector.
He mentioned that it was unfortunate how many government sectors in the Kingdom keep their information hidden from the public eye in an attempt to compete with other government agencies.
Addressing the session entitled “The Flow of Information Between Freedom and Security in the Government Working Sector,” Prince Muhammad said the process of public bodies hiding information from the public eye violated the principles of free flow of information and transparency. “It violates the principle of the freedom of having access to information,” he said, adding that it hindered transparency in dealing with public topics.
In the session entitled “Analysis of the Use of Internet in Recruiting Followers,” Faiz Al-Shehri, said electronic terrorism has become an issue that cannot be disputed. “Since the end of the 20th century, with the users of the Web increasing to deploy information on the Web, electronic terrorism has become a real issue,” he said.
The speaker mentioned that since governments around the world after 9/11 have cut off previous methods used by terrorists to spread their messages, fanatics have turned to the Internet. “They have taken advantage of the freedom on the Web and the absence of supervision,” he said.
Speaking at the conference in the session entitled “The Message as Vehicle, as Sign, as Content,” Juan Santander said the message between the sender and the recipient is a vehicle that can be misleading, purportedly to avoid the disclosure of the content, and in such a case, the “inner” secret content that bears the real meaning in which the content is pursued.
“Despite many techniques used by agencies to detect words such as ‘war’, ‘killing’, ‘bomb’, ‘explode’, in messages, it is still simple to accord upon a language that avoids these kinds of terms,” he said. “The basic idea is that security cannot be warranted only by technical means and devices, but needs a work of intelligence dealing with the ensemble of attitudes and trends in individual or groups under suspicion.”
Under the title “Connecting Security Bodies Electronically to Facilitate the Exchange of Information to Combat Terror”, Zuhair Ridwan of the Saudi Navy said that security departments in the Kingdom should be electronically linked together.
“This will help the Information Center at the National Security Council in studying information and analyzing it with regard to terror threats or other issues of national security,” he said.
Ridwan said it was essential that the National Security Council in the Kingdom have a central role in coordinating information exchanged among government bodies. “Currently, government bodies have adopted an independent and secretive pattern independent of one another,” he said.
