edelman writes "Professor Jonathan Zittrain and I have been studying Internet filtering worldwide and are today releasing our first country-specific investigation in a series on this subject. Our Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia reports some 2,000+ web pages blocked in Saudi Arabia. See highlights of blocked pages.
In recent testing, we designed software to connect to the Internet through proxy servers in Saudi Arabia, and we subsequently attempted to access approximately 60,000 Web pages as a means of empirically determining the scope and pervasiveness of Internet filtering there. Saudi-installed filtering systems prevented access to certain requested Web pages; the authors tracked a total of 2,038 blocked pages. Such pages contained information about religion, health, education, reference, humor, and entertainment.
We conclude that the Saudi government maintains an active interest in filtering non-sexually explicit Web content for users within the Kingdom. We also find that substantial amounts of non-sexually explicit Web content is in fact effectively inaccessible to most Saudi Arabians. Finally, we note that much of this content consists of sites that are popular elsewhere
in the world.
Our full report, along with a listing of specific blocked web pages, is available at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia
Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School"
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