BEIRUT, August 13, 2009 (MENASSAT) — While governments in the Middle East and North Africa continue to make investments in media and IT projects, they are also investing in censorship technologies to prevent their citizens from accessing a wide spectrum of content considered objectionable by authorities. 

That is the conclusion of the 2009 report on Internet content controls in the MENA region issued by Open Net Initiative–– a partnership among groups at four US, UK, and Canadian universities: Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

During the last few years there has been heavy investment in media and IT infrastructure projects in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, among other MENA countries. 

Take Dubai and Abu Dhabi for example. In addition to existing regional media and IT hubs such as Dubai Media City and Dubai Internet City, the UAE recently launched a new content creation zone in a bid to support media content creators in the MENA region. The new zone, based in neighboring Abu Dhabi, seeks to employ Arab media professionals in film, broadcast, digital and publishing. Major international media organizations such as CNN, BBC, the Financial Times, and Thomson Reuters are among the partners of the zone. 

There is also the Jordanian plan that has emerged, to create a free IT zone in the capital Amman, which would give sales and income tax breaks to the IT and business firms based in the zone. Jordan’s plans to build an IT zone is part of its strategy to increase the number of Internet users from 26 percent to 50 percent and increase employment in the sector. 

And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the Doha Center for Media Freedom –– the Qatar-based international institution founded in 2007 to boost press freedoms and provide refuge for threatened journalists in the region. 

On the other side of the spectrum, when it comes to building free IT zones, more media hubs, and institutions in support of free speech and the protection of outspoken journalists are the somber statistics on web censorship, repressive media laws, and persecution of media workers and bloggers in the region that gives a bleaker outlook for the future of IT Arabia.

The MENA remains one of the world’s most heavily censored regions, the report claims. Not only is web censorship on the rise but so is the number of bloggers and cyber-dissidents being jailed for their online activism. 

“Our latest research results on Internet filtering and surveillance in the Middle East and North Africa confirm the growing use of next generation cyberspace controls beyond mere denial of information," said Ron Deibert, ONI Principal Investigator and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Center for International Studies, University of Toronto. "The media environment of the Middle East and North Africa region is a battle-space where commercially-enhanced blocking, targeted surveillance, self-censorship, and intimidation compete with enhanced tools of censorship circumvention and mobile activism."

According to ONI’s most recent round of testing, Internet filtering across the region is increasing, both in terms of scope and depth. While political censorship tends to be the most common type of filtering, social filtering is becoming more prevalent, says the study. 

The countries that practice the highest amount of political filtering are, according to the report, Iran, Bahrain, Syria and Tunisia. The “ social filters” can mainly be found in the Gulf and include Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. They usually filter pornography, LGBT sites, and pages containing information on sexual health.

Recently, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have caught the attention of these regimes, especially when it comes to activists in Arab countries who use these sites for political campaigning and social activism.

ONI says that the blocking of social networking sites remains commonplace in MENA. Syria and Tunisia both block YouTube and Facebook, and the photo-sharing site Flickr is filtered in Iran and the UAE. The UAE and Saudi Arabia censor certain YouTube videos but do not block the entire site. 

The report also states that several Arab countries have started to block outspoken and “morally objectionable” content in Arabic that was previously accessible. 

The countries that do not filter any sites at the moment are Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and the West Bank, according to ONI testing. 

However some of them do instead use surveillance software to keep an eye on the browsing habits of those using the Internet in public.  In free-wheeling Lebanon, for example, a country whose citizens enjoy perhaps the greatest amount of freedoms compared to any other country in the region, some Internet café operators have apparently admitted to using surveillance software to monitor their clients in a bid to protect security or prevent them from accessing pornography.  In Egypt, Internet café  users must provide their names, phone numbers, and email addresses before using the Internet.

According to ONI, there has been an overall increase in the monitoring of Internet activities, particularly in Internet cafés, by the authorities in the past two years.

Nokia spy system

Most governments are supposedly not transparent about their censorship practices, confusing Internet users by displaying various different “error messages.” Such actions also stem from Western companies who, on the one hand, build IT infrastructure needed for development in the region and then also provide the filterers with technologies and data used to censor the web.

"Governments…. continue to disguise their political filtering, while acknowledging blocking of social content, and censors are catching up with increasing amounts of online content, in part by using filtering software developed by companies in the U.S,” said Helmi Noman, the OpenNet Initiative's Middle East and North Africa lead researcher.

Most recently, the leading mobile phone company Nokia found itself in the midst of a scandal when media reports surfaced about the company selling an electronic surveillance system to Iran, which human rights activists say can target political dissidents. The “monitoring center” was delivered to Irancell by the cell-phone giant and Germany’s Siemens. According to a Nokia spokesman it was sold to the Islamic Republic for "lawful intercept functionality,” a term supposedly used by the mobile-phone industry to refer to law enforcement's ability to intercept phones, read e-mails and monitor electronic data on communications networks.

Iranian journalist Issa Saharkhiz says he recently fell prey to Nokia’s spy system and claims he was arrested due to Nokia’s technology, with authorities using his Nokia cell phone to track him down and take him into custody.

Apart from heavy Internet filtering, MENA is also home to a series of repressive media laws. Earlier this spring, The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) urged a radical change in the media laws in the region, claiming that the laws in most countries still permit the jailing of journalists for undermining the reputation of the state, the president, the monarch or religion. 

These types of laws are often used to hinder reporting of corruption and government actions, according to ONI.  Bloggers and cyber-dissidents have not been exempt from the region’s current hostile media environment; research conducted by the US-based press freedom watchdog, the Committee to Protect Journalists, claims Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia are four of the worst countries in the world to be a blogger in. 

Laws and regulations used to control access in MENA range from press and publication laws, to special emergency and anti-terrorism laws and Internet-specific telecommunication law decrees. Morocco, for example, uses its anti-terrorism legislation, passed following suicide bombings in Casablanca in 2003, to persecute journalists. The bill provides the authorities with sweeping legal powers to arrest journalists for publishing content deemed to “disrupt public order by intimidation, force, violence, fear or terror.”

So is there any good news at all? Well, even though “increased filtering is the rule and unblocking the exception,” as ONI puts it, there are a few highlights of the latter included in the report. 

Syria, for example, has unblocked the Arabic-language version of Wikipedia, Morocco has lifted a ban on several pro-Western Sahara independence websites, and Libya has started to unblock previously filtered political sites. Meanwhile, Sudan has lessened its censorship of LGBT and dating sites since ONI’s last report.