Unblocking Websites
By Joe Avanceña

DAMMAM: WHILE the Kingdom continuously filters Internet websites, it is also constantly unblocking websites that no longer pose threat to the Saudi culture and society.

“Internet is dynamic. If the blocked websites no longer carry the contents that were previously considered harmful, we unblock them,” said Dr. Abdulaziz Al-Zoman, a consultant at the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), the country’s regulatory body for the IT and telecommunications.

“We do not block or unblock to achieve numbers. If in our judgment a site no longer carries un-Islamic references or pornographic materials, or, because technology committed mistakes by wrongly placing a content in the site, which is very rare, then the site is restored,” Zoman said.

The blocking and unblocking of websites are enforced by the Internet Service Units (ISU) at the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).

According to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society of the Harvard Law School, which conducted a documentation of Internet filtering in the Kingdom, ISU blocks religious sites, health pages that prescribe illegal drugs, pornographic sites, offensive humor pages, sites on gay communities, pages that are hostile to the Kingdom, controversial Middle Eastern portals dedicated to politics, entertainment, music and movie sites, and those that advocate violence.

Saudi Gazette carries this piece on how and why the Saudi government blocks unwanted websites. This is, of course, the government’s side of the story. There are many allegations that the filtering is far more political than ‘moral’, though, as the Harvard Univ. study noted spells out.

I think the job is an impossible one, both theoretically and physically. Physically, there are many ways to get around the ISU if one wishes to do so. Some are easier than others, only taking a bit of money, but it’s not all that hard for anyone with the desire to find work-arounds.

Theoretically, it’s probably a good thing that the government takes efforts to block, for instance, jihadist and extremist websites. But government’s role should not be to control what people think. Keeping people ignorant of the reality of the world around them—whether in the same city or across the globe—does not lead to mature thinking. The government is faced with a dilemma for which there really is no good solution.