by Brian Whitaker
The Guardian, 11 May, 2000

Saudi Arabia, which nervously allowed the first public access to the internet little more than a year ago, claims to have discovered the key to blocking cyberporn, gambling sites and other "undesirable" material.

There are now many internet cafes - constructed to keep male and female surfers apart - and around 30 commercial internet service providers, but the apparent range of choice belies the fact that all traffic passes through the King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology in Riyadh, which is the country's only link to the web.

For a wealthy country, Saudi Arabia may appear slow in adopting the internet but, in the words of Saleh Abdulrahman al-Adhel, the president of the KACST, the kingdom was waiting until the technology was available to ban access to "material that corrupts or that harms our Muslim values, tra dition, and culture".

The Saudis are not alone in their fears. Other governments have tried to block internet access using cruder methods. The Chinese, for example, have tried to restrict access to modems.

The director of the Saudi government's internet monitoring system, Dr Fahad al-Hoymany, says he believes his team are blocking all major pornographic sites.

Saad Fagih, of the exiled opposition Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, testifies to the system's effectiveness and says millions of other websites have been blocked, including "all the hot political sites, such as Amnesty International".

Computer industry sources say the Saudis' system works in two ways. First, it caches previously-approved web pages in a 500-gigabyte storage system. Users get these pages from the computer in Riyadh rather than the original source on the web. This means that frequently-used pages can be accessed quickly without the system having to check their suitability each time.

Requests for pages that are not stored in the cache are passed to the second stage of the system, supplied by a US-based company, Websense, which lists and can filter out 30 categories of potentially unsuitable sites.

Experts concede that these filters are imperfect. One said: "You're always half a step behind because of the growth and change of the internet."

Another said: "Filter systems are very difficult to administer and are likely to over-censor - for example cutting out information about breast cancer or Aids in order to exclude sex sites."

Saudi opposition sources say that despite the filtering, government control of internet use is more fragile than it might appear. They say some cafes have illegal, direct satellite links to the internet, to which the authorities frequently turn a blind eye. Last month a women's internet cafe near to Mecca University was closed down after a complaint that it was being used for "immoral purposes".

Individuals who want unrestricted access to the internet can, if they wish, simply obtain a service provider in a neighbouring country.

While some complain that the main purpose of the filtering system is to block politically sensitive material, Dr Hoymany argues that it is designed to give assurance to Saudis that when they log on to the internet their social or religious traditions will not be offended.

This suggests to some observers that the Saudis' approach to the internet may be more subtle than it appears.

For a time, it was unclear what attitude strict Muslims - not only in Saudi Arabia but throughout the Islamic world - would adopt towards the internet.

Perhaps surprisingly, they have taken to it with great enthusiasm, deciding that it can be a useful vehicle for spreading their message.

The economic future of Saudi Arabia may depend on making full use of the internet and a filtering system which reassures conservatives may be the key to exploiting the new technology.

However, Saudi Arabia's slow start may prove costly. Unlike some of its neighbours it still has neither internet banking nor a legal framework for e-commerce.

Andrew Puddephatt, executive director of Article 19, the campaign against censorship, argues that government monopoly of communications, and internet monitoring and filtering, is ultimately incompatible with e-commerce.

"There's no possibility of developing e-commerce unless they allow liberalisation and the growth of independent service providers," he says. "It's a choice between surrendering control and being shut off from the electronic future."