Middle East censors seek to limit Web access

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Middle East censors seek to limit Web access
By Hannah Allam | McClatchy Newspapers

* Posted on Wednesday, December 26, 2007


CAIRO, Egypt — In Iran, a large red icon pops up on computer screens. In Syria, there's a discreet note from the filter. Other Arab nations display "blocked" in bold lettering or issue crafty "page not found" replies.

However the censors put it, the message is clear: You're not permitted to see this Web site.

Governments in the Middle East are stepping up a campaign of censorship and surveillance in an effort to prevent an estimated 33.5 million Internet users from viewing a variety of Web sites whose topics range from human rights to pornography. As a result, millions of Middle Easterners are finding it harder by the day to access popular news and entertainment sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.

Five of the world's top-13 Internet censors are in the Middle East, according to the most recent report from Reporters Without Borders, the journalism advocacy group that lobbies against Web censorship.

"The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers," Reporters Without Borders said in its annual report for 2007. "Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships to fight them. Dictators, too, have entered the world of Web 2.0."

Internet regulations vary widely across the Middle East. Predictably, the most authoritarian governments have the most aggressive filters, but even some without advanced censorship systems have prosecuted bloggers for controversial postings on religion or politics.

Just as Internet users have banded together on social networking sites to challenge the wave of censorship, the region's governments also are uniting to share filtering software and the latest online surveillance technology, activists said.

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