Censorship in Saudi Arabia - Internet

Internet

Saudi Arabia directs all international Internet traffic through a proxy farm located in King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology. A content filter is implemented there, based on software by Secure Computing. Since October 2006, the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) has been handling the DNS structure and filtering in Saudi Arabia in the place of KACST. Additionally, a number of sites are blocked according to two lists maintained by the Internet Services Unit (ISU): one containing "immoral" (mostly pornographic) sites and sites promoting Shia Ideology, the others based on directions from a security committee run by the Ministry of Interior (including sites critical of the Saudi government). An interesting feature of this system is that citizens are encouraged to actively report "immoral" sites (which promotes liberal Islamic Ideology) for blocking, using a provided web form, available in government's website. The Royal Family is very partial toward the Wahabi version of Islam and any website which is against it is banned.

The legal basis for content filtering is the resolution by Council of Ministers dated 12 February 2001. According to a study carried out in 2004 by the Open Net Initiative "the most aggressive censorship focused on pornography, drug use, gambling, religious conversion of Muslims, and filtering circumvention tools."

However, Saudi Arabia has been noted to also actively block and filter access to "politically astray" and other websites that the government deems inappropriate, including content that discuss sexual education, family planning, feminism and gay rights.

On 11 July 2006 the Saudi government blocked access to Wikipedia and Google Translate, which was being used to bypass the filters on the blocked sites by translating them.

In 2011, the Saudi government introduced new Internet rules and regulations that require all online newspapers and bloggers to obtain a special license from the Ministry of Culture and Information. The Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) is responsible for regulating the Internet and for hosting a firewall which blocks access to thousands of websites, mainly due to sexual and political content. Many articles from the English and Arabic Wikipedia projects are censored in Saudi Arabia with no given explanation.