Everyone’s heard of The Great Firewall of China and it’s international eyebrow-raising responses from the internet community. China’s Firewall has come into the spotlight with criticism from all around the world. But China isn’t the only one, and it isn’t even necessarily the biggest — it’s just the one people talk about most. There is one Firewall in particular that is close to and may even surpass the Great Firewall of China when it comes to complete and utter control of information. Which country? Saudi Arabia of course.

Everyone agrees the internet is full of both the good and the bad, and that you can’t necessarily have one without the other. The only real question is, whose to decide what’s right and what’s not? Who can say whether a country is right or wrong to decide what’s good for its people; what they can or cannot access, and where they get their information from. Generally speaking, every man or woman should decide for themselves; but some countries have made the decisions for their citizens and that’s the world we live in.

Saudi Arabia is such a country. It’s approach may be vastly different from that of China, it may not be making the headlines by requesting that websites tailor their content to suit the Kingdom’s likings, but nevertheless, Saudi Arabia’s firewall is just as powerful and as just as controlling, and all the more dangerous in its subtle and invisible way.

An anonymous NST reader in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia provided us with the data needed for this report — without it, this story would have been impossible. It runs a lot deeper than we’ll ever be able to research, but what we have certainly was a shocker. First some background though.

Saudi Arabian telecommunications is locked off to a single internet provider: the Saudi Telecom Company (STC), a government-subsidized corporation in charge of all telephone, cellular, internet, and other data exchange mediums that take place in Saudi Arabia. This single-company perfect monopoly is government protected, and emerged as a result of privatization in the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Telex, Mail, and Telephone in 1998. Since then it has been involved in a campaign of complete information control on all in- and out-bound traffic in the Kingdom.

When an STC subscriber logs onto their DSL or signs in to the reseller-provided dial-up internet accounts, the trail begins. All requests are invisibly handled by a proxy server on the ISP’s side – nothing intellectually challenging or exceptionally technologically advanced there. It passes through your generic proxy no-cache server that simply filters the URI request through a domain blacklist. If the URI is on it, you are redirected to a no-frills page informing you that access to the URI in question has been denied, and offers you a link to a "please allow this URI form" that no one ever follows up on. Simple.

But that was just a warm-up. If Saudi Arabia wants complete information control, and it isn’t asking Google for its help, you can bet there is something more sinister going on than that; and indeed there is. Not only are the requested URIs filtered, but so are the data packets traded back and forth. For instance, you can browse Google at your leisure, cookies flying this way and that, with Google tracking you every step of the way like they always do... But when you are sent a bit of data you shouldn’t have, it goes missing somewhere along the way.

An example is if you attempt to disable Safe Search, Google’s homebrew content-control system that blocks some inappropriate content in its web searches. If you want to turn it off, you just tell it, and it ’marks’ your computer as an exception by storing a cookie on it... But here’s where it gets creepy: Saudi Arabias’ complex two-way proxy servers will intercept that cookie. They know exactly how it looks, and what it does. And they manage to lose it. Google sends you on your way, but you don’t have that valuable cookie, and Safe Search is still on. Same on Yahoo! and same on MSN — it’s not going to happen.

According to the data we have, Saudi Arabia isn’t filtering keywords; an approach filled with false positives and easily avoidable by using images or alternate spellings instead. Rather, it seems they have a bunch of guys in dorky glasses at the Ministry of Telex scouring the web for ’tainted’ sites and blacklisting them as they come along. They probably do have keyword-based content flags that go off when you hit a keyword and triage the results, and they probably have a lot of these ’content controllers’ at work too.

Just how far their Firewall goes isn’t exactly clear, they don’t exactly have a "Freedom of Information Act" that someone could call on (though it seems to be null in void even in the USA at the moment), and even if they did, who’s to say the information is the real deal? It doesn’t really matter, it’s the principle that counts, but try this on for size:

Earlier this year, China announced that it didn’t like porn online, so by the year 2008 China would be pornography free thanks to their state-of-the-art web filters. Saudi Arabia took that mission on ages ago, and even if it’s not perfect, they have a system going. China blocks information about past rebellions, Saudi Arabia is known to block any ’suspicious’ political websites that crop up. China requests international cooperation, Saudi Arabia just works without it. China finds a bad page on a big site so it blocks access to the page, Saudi Arabia finds a page it doesn’t like on a big site the entire domain is blocked.

It's not just the DSL or the dial-up, it's the mobile communications and the SMS messages too. Calls to "problem territories" such as Gaza and the West Bank rarely go through, and SMS messages sent are all heavily moderated. TV Show-sponsored SMS messages are dumped without a thought, and the sender is never even informed.

If you're interested in evading it you're going to have to go really far out of your way. Access to all know proxy websites and IPs, alternate online gateways, or otherwise data channeling via a foreign source are all disabled. You can't access even a private tunnel if it's running a publicly available proxy script. Just not gonna happen. That and the fact that STC has it's IP addresses blocked at a great number of online social sites such as Slashdot, digg, and Wikipedia (ast two are on and off, a mood thing) makes it kind of hard to keep in touch with others or really find out what's going on.

We don’t have numbers because there are none to give. This thing is huge, it’s not just one country or two, it’s a way of life. It boils down to ethics, privacy, and freedom of choice. Do we need them, or are they just frivolous extras we’d simply like to have? Either way, there is one thing clear: a choice needs to be made, and rights have to be protected. Maybe they were right to block that one site, maybe even the next... But at some point we won’t agree, and someone’s going to be right while another is wrong. Yesterday it was the people of China, today it’s Saudi Arabia’s citizens, and tomorrow.. it just might be you.