The booming business of Internet censorship

Throughout most of the Middle East and North Africa, online censorship is the norm.

The level of censorship varies; in Morocco, only a handful of sites relating to the Western Sahara, Google Earth, and Livejournal are deemed offencive enough to ban, while other countries – like Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria – filter the internet pervasively, banning political sites as well as social content.

Though the filtering itself is conducted by the governments of each country, it is made possible by technology imported mainly from the United States and Canada.