Textual Thoughts

The “Wikipedia”:http://www.wikipedia.org has an “article”:http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etisalat on Etisalat’s internet filtering (censorship) policy. “Etisalat”:http://www.etisalat.ae is the UAE’s state owned telecommunications company. It has a policy of actively filtering internet websites which are “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the UAE”.

Apparently the websites which fall under the following categories are actively blocked in the UAE by Etisalat:

# Pornography
# Religious content and/or content that is against the religion of Islam
# Content that criticises the rulers of the UAE
# Information about cracking, phreaking, etc
# Information on how to get around the internet block
# Websites offering P2P services/torrent files
# Dating and matrimonial sites
# Gay and lesbian sites
# Basically the entire Israel (.il domain) TLD
# Other material that EIM, or the Government of the UAE considers objectionable
# Websites that offer VOIP telephony (such as Skype) at subsidised rates, which effect Etisalats’ profits
# Certain blogs
# Certain file hosting websites
# Certain Image hosts
# Criminal Skills

Unfortunately “Skype”:http://www.skype.com and “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com fall under items 11 and 14 respectively. Etisalat has been “reported”:http://www.answers.com/topic/censorship-in-cyberspace to be using the “SmartFilter”:http://www.securecomputing.com/index.cfm?skey=85 technology of “SecureComputing”:http://www.securecomputing.com which lists websites into “70 different categories”:http://www.securecomputing.com/index.cfm?skey=86. “SmartFilterWhere”:http://www.securecomputing.com/sfwhere/index.cfm is a tool to check which category a website falls into.

There is also an “interesting study”:http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/uae/ONI_UAE_Country_Study.pdf , by the “OpenNet Initiative”:http://www.opennetinitiative.net/, into the UAE’s internet filtering efforts with a detailed discussion on the types of filters employed.