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Meet Saudi Arabia's most famous computer expert

No normal citizen of a secular "western" nation would tolerate this level of interference with his or her Internet use, but this is a conservative Islamic state where protection from Internet evils like pornography doesn't draw much protest. Saudi Arabia seems to have lightened up a bit on political and religious censorship in the last year, a relaxation for which Al-Hejery cannot claim credit. He says security agencies, not his Internet Service Unit, decide which sites to block for any reason besides obvious pornography.

Now it's time for a little disclaimer: The Saudi Internet filters are easy to defeat. I found at least a dozen anonymous surfing sites that let me view all the porn anyone could want in less than 30 minutes, and I have viewed more online porn while testing the Saudi content filters than I had looked at in my entire life before this experiment. Al-Hejery, too, knows that anyone with much knowledge of the Internet and computers can blow right by the Saudi content filters. He sees the filtering as a way to protect children and other innocents from Internet evils, and not much more than that.

Many complaints from westerners about Saudi Internet censorship are not about pornography, but about blocked sites that deal with topics like women's rights, civil liberties, gay sexuality, and religions other than Islam. I tried to reach a number of the blocked sites mentioned in the Harvard Law research study, Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia, last updated Sept. 12, 2002, and found that some of the more innocuous sites blocked at that time -- like iVillage.com -- are now available, but that many others on the list are still blocked. I found that non-Muslim religious sites seem to be more available in Saudi Arabia now than they apparently were in the past. Testimonies of Muslims who become Christians is the sort of title that almost certainly would have brought up the "Access to the requested URL is not allowed!" page (see screenshot) instead of the site itself a year or two ago. I also found that some human rights-oriented sites, including Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International, that were once blocked are now available -- and not just their main pages, but pages that deal specifically with Saudi government abuses.

Click to enlarge

On the other hand, just about any site that portrays Judaism or Israel in a positive light isn't allowed -- although this page debunking the (sadly) widely held Muslim extremist myth that Jews drink Muslim blood, and other anti-Semitic libels, seems to have slipped through the cracks, and can be viewed by Saudi residents without going through anonymous proxies or using other filter-defeating tactics.

(Saudis with money to pay massive phone bills don't need to take any special measures to get around the filters. They can simply obtain an ISP account in one of the less restrictive neighboring countries and do their Web surfing via long distance calls.)

Al-Hejery shrugs off the people who bypass the filters. He points out that the system has wide public support, demonstrated by the fact that the Internet Service Unit currently receives over 200 "legitimate" requests to block sites every day, but only a "trickle" of requests to unblock sites that citizens feel are being hidden improperly.

Asked what he considers an "illegitimate" blocking request, he says, "Well, like to block CNN."

I point out that there are times when U.S. President George W. Bush would probably like to have CNN blocked, too, and Al-Hejery laughs.

Content filters are just part of the job

While the content filters get all the press attention, Al-Hejery's operation is far more than that. He points out, "This is the Internet gateway for Saudi Arabia." All ISPs must, by law, route through it. The Internet Service Unit is also the registrar for the .sa top level domain, and is generally the go-to agency for any Internet-related matter here, just as its name implies.

Al-Hejery went to work for the Internet Service Unit soon after he got his PhD, and rose through the ranks to his present position. He is a techie, not a religious or political radical. His job is not to decide which sites Saudis are allowed to see or not see, but to keep a horde of servers and routers humming along. And if he fails, what with the fact that sending all Internet traffic in the whole country through a single chokepoint obviously creates a single point of failure, all Net traffic in Saudi Arabia stops. There is at least a little redunancy built into the system, with gateways in both Riyadh and Jedda, but this is nowhere near the level of fail-safe connectivity major U.S. online companies expect from their bandwidth providers.

This kind of worry can make a man a little nervous, especially since his systems are as swamped by spam and DDoS attacks as any other backbone provider's. And once you get Al-Hejery going on the twin topics of spam and DDoS, you are suddenly no longer talking to someone who runs one of the world's two most notorious Internet censorship systems (the other one being China's) but to a guy who is angry about ignorant computer owners hooking unprotected computers to "always on" cable modems or DSL lines where they can be used as open spam relays or DDoS zombies by anyone with even a little bit of cracking skill.

Sadly, the Saudi Net filter doesn't stop spam. "If you could stop spam," I told Al-Hejery, "You could make a million dollars a day as a consultant for the U.S. government, and I'd even kick in some extra out of my own pocket."

"If I could do that," he replied, "I would be a hero here, too."

Author's note: Plenty has been written elsewhere about the political side of Saudi Arabia's Internet censorship policy. This article is not an attempt to justify it, since I find the idea as appalling as anyone else raised in the U.S. who believes wholeheartedly in our Constitution's First Amendment. But just once, I thought, we should step back and take a look at the man who is charged with making this unwieldy system work -- and to point out that he's as aware as anyone else of the system's flaws.