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....

As Pakistan lifted a two-week long ban on Facebook Monday, Bangladesh began blocking the site. Both bans followed the creation of a Facebook group promoting "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," an event that encourages participants to submit artistic representations of the prophet...

Determining whether a Web site is blocked by a state filtering regime is sometimes a complicated issue that goes beyond finding out whether the site is simply accessible or inaccessible, and requires a multi-disciplinary approach, which ONI has been uniquely employing in...

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PDF Version Note: a newer version of this profile is available at Country Profiles: Saudi Arabia.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...