Background Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the cradle of Islam. It embraces a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam and has a strong religious self-identity. Political parties are banned and activists who publicly call for reform risk being jailed....

Over the past few weeks, reports have trickled in to Herdict and via Twitter, alerting us of the filtering of individual Twitter pages in Tunisia and Bahrain (as well as, possibly, China). In Tunisia, the accounts of exiled activist Sami...

PDF Version Note: a newer version of this profile is available at Country Profiles: Saudi Arabia. Overview Saudi Arabia has filtered the Internet since its introduction into the kingdom less than a decade ago. The filtering regime most extensively covers religious...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has just released a list of the ten worst countries in which to blog. Topping the list is Burma, followed closely by Iran, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Tunisia, China, Turkmenistan, and Egypt. In determining...

In addition to technical filtering and surveillance practices, more countries in the Middle East impose restrictions on Internet use in cyber cafés. The latest example comes from Saudi Arabia where Internet cafés have been ordered by the Ministry of Interior to install...

Herdict Web, the proud child of ONI, has just launched its new Arabic user interface. In the past 24 hours since the launch, the Herdict team has been thrilled to note a high number of reports coming from the...

Saudi Arabia has one of the most restrictive Internet filters in the world, yet according to BusinessWeek news reports, the Saudi censorship regime is vastly unlike that of most countries. Employing a mere twenty-five people, the country’s Communication and...

Saudi journalist Molouk Y. Ba-Isa wrote an interesting article in Saudi Arabia’s principal English daily (Arab News) in which she reminds the Western journalists covering the 2008 Olympics in Beijing that censorship for people like her in countries such as Saudi...

On top of all the excitement at WSIS, there have been some recent articles examining freedom of information on the Net in the Arab world and beyond. The UAE has recently legalized VOIP, the technology that enables Internet telephony. Arab...

Foreign Policy writes about the market for access to blocked Web sites in states that filter the Internet. The piece relies on ONI's Saudi Arabia research and quotes principal investigator Ron Deibert. ...