(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has called on the Internet Services Unit (ISU), the agency that manages Web filtering in Saudi Arabia, to explain why the weblog creation and hosting service blogger.com has been made inaccessible since 3 October 2005, preventing Saudi bloggers from updating their blogs. “Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that censors the […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has called on the Internet Services Unit (ISU), the agency that manages Web filtering in Saudi Arabia, to explain why the weblog creation and hosting service blogger.com has been made inaccessible since 3 October 2005, preventing Saudi bloggers from updating their blogs.
“Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that censors the Internet the most, but blog services had not until now been affected by the ISU’s filters,” the organisation said. “The complete blocking of blogger.com, which is one of the biggest blog tools on the market, is extremely worrying. Only China had so far used such an extreme measure to censor the Internet.”
Reached by RSF, the ISU recognised that it had blocked access to blogger.com but did not give any reason. Blogger.com is the point of entry to the management interface for all the weblogs hosted on this tool. In other words, this is the webpage bloggers need to access to update their blogs. According to RSF’s tests, names under the blogger.com domain (for example, http://www.myblog.blogger.com) are not, however, being filtered. This means that Saudi Internet users can still access the blogs hosted on this service.
The Saudi authorities acknowledge blacklisting more than 400,000 websites. A very wide range of sites are affected, including political organisations, non-recognised Islamist movements and publications containing any kind of reference to sexuality.
The ISU (http://www.isu.net.sa) is the agency in charge of the Saudi Web censorship system. It manages the gateway used by all local ISPs and is thus able to control all Internet data exchanges. However, it only carries out instructions issued by the Saudi security services and does not itself decide what must be censored. The ISU offers an online form and e-mail address (abuse@isu.net.sa) that allows Internet uses to report the sites they would like to see blocked. Hundreds of such requests are received each day and are dealt with by a team assigned full-time to the job. The ISU’s filtering system uses technology acquired from the U.S. company Secure Computing.
Blogger.com is a service provided by the U.S. company Google.
