By Awatef Abdel-Rahman Online services provide ordinary people with the opportunity to publish their views to a global audience, something that does not always please the powers that be. New ways of online censorship have developed with governments either monopolising service provision or using filtering programmes to monitor content. In some cases sites have been shut down and users criminally charged. This is happening even in the US where, following 9/ 11, authorities use the Carnivore programme to snoop on web users. In the Middle East some countries have been harsher than others in monitoring and restricting online services. Jordan, Qatar and the Emirates have the least censorship, while Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Egypt screen and often censor web exchanges. Bahrain claims only to block sites that threaten morality and social harmony though critics claim that the majority of blocked sites call for reform. The Egyptian government has set up an Internet surveillance unit while the Tunisian government holds Internet providers fully responsible for the content of cyber exchanges, bans encoding and requires Internet providers to hand in a list of subscribers. Tunisian authorities have blocked hotmail as well as some Palestinian and Egyptian human rights sites. What types of sites are banned? According to Human Rights Watch sites with questionable moral content are often left alone. Sites with political content, especially those that call for constitutional reform and better governance, are closely monitored and frequently shut down. This week's Soapbox speaker is professor of media studies at Cairo University.
