Saudi crowd sources censorship

By Sylvie Barak: Tuesday, 18 November 2008, 4:03 PM

IT DOESN’T NECESSARILY take a lot of government resources to censor the Internet, as Saudi Arabia has discovered using a crowd-sourcing method for depriving people of porn and politics online.

According to Business Week, Saudi Arabia only actually employs 25 people to enforce its brand of stringent Internet censorship, instead relying on approximately 1,200 emailed requests a day from morally concerned Saudi citizens telling them which sites should be blocked.

Apparently students and religious figures with nothing better to do are the Kingdom’s top offensive site flaggers, and Saudi’s Communications & Information Technology Commission (CITC) approves about half of all censorship requests.

Saudi’s CITC isn’t exactly made up of blinkered extremist nuts, either, which makes the oppressively harsh censorship even harder to comprehend. Employees include Harvard and Carnegie Mellon grads and are led by Sulaiman Mirdad, himself a Boston University graduate and co-founder of a Boston-area networking company, InfoLibria which raised $120 million before going under in the dot-com bust.

But CITC reckons Saudi’s are happy with censorship, claiming only 40 per cent of citizens say they are concerned about it. Still, one has to wonder, can’t the 60 per cent who don’t want to be exposed to pr0n, politics and gambling just self censor and avoid certain sites rather than ruining it for the rest? µ