Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Our friends the Saudis are blocking the blogs
Reporters without Borders reports that Saudi Arabia's national ISP is blocking the blogger.com domain:
While it is possible that this is a mistake, it is much more likely that Saudi Arabia is trying to cut off blogger-driven dissent before it spins out of control. Saudi Arabia is shutting down the lonely pamphleteers of the twenty-first century. If the Bush administration's democratization strategy means a damn thing (and I fervently hope that it does), the United States must loudly, immediately, and unremittingly insist that Saudi Arabia set its bloggers free. My suggestion is that you email the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia at info@saudiembassy.net, with a copy to comments@whitehouse.gov. If you go to this page at the State Department's web site you can fill out a contact page.
CWCID: Sabbah, who reports that Flikr is also blocked.
UPDATE (October 7, 6:45 am): Crossroads Arabia thinks that the block on Blogger.com was less likely nefarious than a blown attack on jihadist web sites. Interesting.
Reporters Without Borders today 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, 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 press freedom 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 Reporters Without Borders, 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 our tests, names under the blogger.com domain (for example, www.myblog.blogger.com) are not however being filtered. This means that Saudi Internet users can still access the blogs hosted on this service.
While it is possible that this is a mistake, it is much more likely that Saudi Arabia is trying to cut off blogger-driven dissent before it spins out of control. Saudi Arabia is shutting down the lonely pamphleteers of the twenty-first century. If the Bush administration's democratization strategy means a damn thing (and I fervently hope that it does), the United States must loudly, immediately, and unremittingly insist that Saudi Arabia set its bloggers free. My suggestion is that you email the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia at info@saudiembassy.net, with a copy to comments@whitehouse.gov. If you go to this page at the State Department's web site you can fill out a contact page.
CWCID: Sabbah, who reports that Flikr is also blocked.
UPDATE (October 7, 6:45 am): Crossroads Arabia thinks that the block on Blogger.com was less likely nefarious than a blown attack on jihadist web sites. Interesting.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Oct 06, 11:36:00 PM:
Reporters without Frontiers is now reporting that access to Blogger has been reestablished by the Saudi ISA.
I think this was an accidental case of overkill in trying to stop jihadist bloggers using Blogger.com. I've commented at Crossroads Arabia.
