More Bad News on Internet Freedom in MENA

A report at Menassat citing new report showing that Internet filtering is actually increasing in the Middle East North Africa region. The report itself is available in HTML here and as a PDF here. A press release/FAQ is here.

In one sense, there's not that much new here. Back in March, Reporters Without Borders issued a report naming the 12 countries that were the worst "Internet Enemies": seven (Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) were in the greater Middle East. (The other five were China, North Korea, Burma, Vietnam and Cuba. Great company.) On the other hand, the evidence presented in the latest report, compared to a 2007-2008 study by the same group, suggests the filtering is intensifying. The summary of "Regional Trends" deserves quoting extensively:

Internet censorship in the Middle East and North Africa is on the rise, and the scope and depth of filtering are increasing. Previous ONI tests revealed that political filtering was limited in some countries, but 2008-2009 results indicate that political censorship is targeting more content and is becoming more consistent. For example, previous tests found that Yemen temporarily blocked political Web sites in the run-up to the 2006 presidential elections, and Bahrain did the same ahead of parliamentary elections. However, 2008-2009 testing revealed that filtering in these two countries has been consistently extended to include several Web sites run by opposition groups or news Web sites and forums which espouse oppositional political views.

In the meantime, countries that have been filtering political content continue to add more Web sites to their political blacklists. For example, filtering in Syria was expanded to include popular sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Amazon, as well as more Web sites affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood Kurdish opposition groups. Another example is Tunisia, which added more political and oppositional content as well as other apolitical sites such as the OpenNet Initiative and Global Voices Online.

Social filtering is also increasing and is catching up with the continuously growing social Web. Most of the Arab countries were found to have started to block Arabic-language explicit content that was previously accessible. Interestingly, filtering of Arabic-language explicit Web content in the Middle East and North Africa is usually not as fast as that of other languages. ONI’s investigation revealed that the US-based commercial filtering software used by most of the ISPs in the region does not pick up Arabic content as comprehensively as content in English.

Increases in filtering are the norm in the Middle East and North Africa, and unblocking is the exception. Of the few examples of unblocking of Web sites is Syria’s restoration of access to Wikipedia Arabic, Morocco’s lifting of a ban on a few pro-Western Sahara independence Web sites, and Libya’s allowing access to some previously banned political sites. Sudan’s filtering of gay and lesbian, dating, provocative attire and health-related sites was also more limited compared to previous test results.

Another regional trend is that more Arab countries are introducing regulations to make Web publishing subject to press and publication laws and requiring local Web sites to register with the authorities before they can go live. In Jordan, for example, the country’s Legislation Bureau in the Prime Minister’s Office issued in September 2007 a decision that Web sites and electronic press must comply with the provisions of the publications and publishing law and fall under the oversight of the Publications and Publishing Department, which announced it would exercise immediate supervision and censorship.

Another example is Saudi Arabia, which announced in May 2009 plans to enact legislation for newspapers and Internet Web sites that will require Saudi-based Web sites to get official licenses from a special agency under the purview of the Ministry of Information. Bahrain already has a similar system that requires local Web sites to register with the Ministry of Information.

The idea that web publication must comply with publishing laws intended for the print media is a reminder that many regimes just don't get it yet: or hope to be able to control new media with the ease they controlled the old. Some will succeed, at least for a while. One of the first points most regimes make to support their Internet filtering is that they must block out the outrageously explicit Western pornography that is easily found on the Internet. That wins over the social conservatives, the religious establishment, and probably a great many ordinary citizens. But once the filters are in place it seems to be the political sites, the critics-of-the-regime sites, that are blocked first, along with the pornography.

There are many overlapping issues here, and I'll leave it to the professional monitors to spell them out in greater detail. But it seems to me unlikely that, in the long run, a country that wants to be an integral part of the global economy is going to be able to block or filter Intenet access forever. Blocking pornography is one thing: the porn sites are hardly likely to be trying all sorts of hacker tricks to break through the firewalls, since there's not much profit in it. But the political sites are another matter. Despite all the coverage of the "Great Firewall of China," Chinese dissidents do get read. And during the Iranian uprising after the elections, all sorts of use of proxies were being passed around through Twitter and other media. I barely understand the technology involved, but the more versatile and flexible a medium, the likelier it is you can evade the censors/blockers.