Saudi Arabia losing battle to control access to cyberspace

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia --Surfing the Web at a Saudi Internet cafe, Mazin looks around to see if anyone is watching. "Bingo" whispers the 20-year-old, successfully accessing a pornographic site after several days of trying.

"It's a piece of cake for us. They block us ... and we find other ways in," says Mazin, who would give only his first name. He hastily downloads about a dozen pictures of nude women, an act for which he could be flogged.

In the conservative Muslim kingdom, local media are controlled by the state, whose censors confiscate any foreign publication that criticizes the monarchy. Censors also black out ads in foreign magazines that show scantily dressed women.

Saudi Arabia has no political parties, and dissent is not tolerated.

But now, as the information revolution breaks down global barriers to communication, doubts are being raised about whether the Saudi royal family and other non-democratic governments in the region can continue to maintain tight control over their subjects.

As the Saudi rulers slowly, somewhat reluctantly open up the Internet to their people, they have attempted to filter out freewheeling political discussion as well as pornography.

In vain. Many Saudis are now regularly accessing the political sites their government tries to block, said Mohammed, a Saudi government official who spoke on condition he not be further identified.

"For decades, the Saudis were fed the information by the government, with no questions asked. Now, they relish the opportunity to check out the other side of the story--and they do," he said.

Mohammed said the sites accessed are mainly those addressing accusations of corruption within the royal family and opposition sites calling for a democratic rule.

While there have been no reported cases of people being prosecuted for accessing prohibited sites, authorities said they blocked access last month to parts of the U.S.-based Yahoo! Web portal that contained pornographic and other material deemed offensive.

In Saudi Arabia, authorities fear the Internet will mean drastic changes to a society where women are not allowed to drive, need written permission from male relatives to travel and must cover up in public from head to toe. It is a nation without cinemas or theaters, where restaurants are segregated by gender.

Officials began offering Internet service to the public last year after spending two years studying how to provide what authorities describe as useful information while keeping out what has been taboo for decades everything from expletive-ridden rap songs to discussion of opposition to the royal family.

So far, the kingdom of 18 million people has an estimated 120,000 Internet users, a figure expected to jump to 300,000 by year's end. Most get online at Internet cafes, which number close to 200 across the kingdom.

Elsewhere in the region, in countries from Qatar to Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait, censorship efforts are also the norm.

The sole Internet provider in the United Arab Emirates, for example, filters selected Web sites related not just to politics and sex but also including such sites as www.quios.com, which allows short text messages to be sent to mobile telephones.

What Saudi Arabia and many of its neighbors are doing by trying to construct dikes against the Internet-borne sea of information around them, analysts say, is to deny their citizens the very tools needed to develop and be competitive.

"Closed societies such as the Saudis' will ban themselves from the vastly increasing availability of data and contacts in all fields that profit a still-developing society," said Leonard Sussman of Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based media watchdog. "Such a ban is like withdrawing into a new Dark Age." Elsewhere in the Arab world, repressive regimes are far stricter on Internet access.

In Iraq, only government officials had access until this year, when a few carefully monitored Internet cafes were opened. Knowing they are being watched, few Iraqis would dare tap into the sites of exiled opposition parties, however.

Syrian authorities also restricted Internet access to government officials at first and later extended it to select businesses. Today, only about 5,000 of Syria's 17.5 million people have Internet access.

In Saudi Arabia, where the Internet has opened up perspectives especially for women, business people and the English-reading elite, industry experts say attempts to block access to politically sensitive sites are not only futile but seriously degrade network performance.

"By filtering the Internet, authorities have created a bottleneck situation that is choking access and causing great reductions in speed," said Saud Kateb, the U.S.-educated chief executive of Ofoq Information Systems and Communications, one of 26 local providers contracted by the government to sell Internet access.

Kateb thinks filtering is best done locally--not at government-owned servers.

Besides, no one can prevent Saudis from making a long-distance call to connect by modem to a censorship-free ISP abroad.