{"id":239,"date":"2006-08-28T00:24:01","date_gmt":"2006-08-28T00:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/archives\/239"},"modified":"2007-01-20T08:00:38","modified_gmt":"2007-01-20T08:00:38","slug":"the-other-great-firewall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/the-other-great-firewall\/","title":{"rendered":"The Other<\/em> Great Firewall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone\u2019s heard of The Great Firewall of China and it\u2019s international eyebrow-raising responses from the internet community. China\u2019s Firewall has come into the spotlight with criticism from all around the world. But China isn\u2019t the only one, and it isn\u2019t even necessarily the biggest \u2014 it\u2019s 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.\n<\/p>\n

Everyone agrees the internet is full of both the good and the bad, and that you can\u2019t necessarily have one without the other. The only real question is, whose to decide what\u2019s right and what\u2019s not? Who can say whether a country is right or wrong to decide what\u2019s 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\u2019s the world we live in.\n<\/p>\n

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Saudi Arabia is such a country. It\u2019s 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\u2019s likings, but nevertheless, Saudi Arabia\u2019s firewall is just as powerful and as just as controlling, and all the more dangerous in its subtle and invisible way.\n<\/p>\n

An anonymous NST reader in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia provided us with the data needed for this report \u2014 without it, this story would have been impossible. It runs a lot deeper than we\u2019ll ever be able to research, but what we have certainly was a shocker. First some background though.\n<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s side \u2013 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.\n<\/p>\n

But that was just a warm-up. If Saudi Arabia wants complete information control, and it isn\u2019t 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\u2019t have, it goes missing somewhere along the way.\n<\/p>\n

An example is if you attempt to disable Safe Search, Google\u2019s homebrew content-control system that blocks some<\/em> inappropriate content in its web searches. If you want to turn it off, you just tell it, and it \u2019marks\u2019 your computer as an exception by storing a cookie on it… But here\u2019s where it gets creepy: Saudi Arabias\u2019 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\u2019t have that valuable cookie, and Safe Search is still on. Same on Yahoo! and same on MSN \u2014 it\u2019s not going to happen.\n<\/p>\n

According to the data we have, Saudi Arabia isn\u2019t 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 \u2019tainted\u2019 sites and blacklisting them as they come along. They probably do<\/em> 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 \u2019content controllers\u2019 at work too.\n<\/p>\n

Just how far their Firewall goes isn\u2019t exactly clear, they don\u2019t 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\u2019s to say the information is the real deal? It doesn\u2019t really matter, it\u2019s the principle that counts, but try this on for size:\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, China announced that it didn\u2019t 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\u2019s not perfect, they have a system going. China blocks information about past rebellions, Saudi Arabia is known to block any \u2019suspicious\u2019 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\u2019t like on a big site the entire domain<\/em> is blocked.\n<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

If you’re interested in evading it you’re going to have to go really<\/em> 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.\n<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have numbers because there are none to give. This thing is huge, it\u2019s not just one country or two, it\u2019s 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\u2019d 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\u2019t agree, and someone\u2019s going to be right while another is wrong. Yesterday it was the people of China, today it\u2019s Saudi Arabia\u2019s citizens, and tomorrow.. it just might be you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone\u2019s heard of The Great Firewall of China and it\u2019s international eyebrow-raising responses from the internet community. China\u2019s Firewall has come into the spotlight with criticism from all around the world. But China isn\u2019t the only one, and it isn\u2019t … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[211,103,81,210],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-facism","tag-government","tag-internet","tag-saudi-arabia"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xDa-3R","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}