*34c3 intro*
Herald: All right, so the next talk is
"Catch me if you can: Internet Activism in Saudi Arabia." Now I have one question for
you. Who has ever been in Saudi Arabia? Like, actually in the country. And no,
Dubai is not Saudi Arabia. I see a couple of hands, like three or something. That's
actually more than I thought. I'm surprised, because you cannot just get a
tourist visa for Saudi Arabia, even if you would like to go there. But our next
speaker, she has been in Saudi Arabia and actually lived and worked there for two
years. So Miriam, also known to you maybe as Noujoum, has quite some knowledge about
the culture, people, and politics of this country that seems quite foreign to us
all. So we're all excited to hear Miriam now. Give her a nice applause, thanks.
*applause*
Noujoum: Thank you very much for the kind
introduction, and welcome everyone. I'm super excited to talk to you today about
internet activism in Saudi Arabia. It's one of my favorite subjects. I could go on
and on for hours, but we just have half an hour. So let's dive right into it. First I
want to show you what I want to tell you today about. First I
want to give you some basic information about Saudi Arabia. Then we are going to
look at Saudi Arabia's cybercrime law and see how it has affected activists in
recent years, and then I want to talk about internet censorship and how we can
actually measure it by running an OONI probe. And then finally, because I don't
want to leave you depressed I also want to spend some minutes on talking about
positive things. The modern state of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by the Al Saud
family, who is still ruling to this very day and it's an absolute monarchy and the
culture is dominated by an ultraconservative branch of Islam that is
called Wahhabism and due to its riches from the oil industry, the country is
actually quite modern when it comes to commodities and technology. And I'm going
to throw some statistics at you. The total population of Saudi Arabia is around 33
million people and 75% of them are younger than the age of 30. And you can see here
the population pyramids of Saudi Arabia compared with the population pyramid of
Germany, and you get a very good idea what a country with a younger population looks
like versus a country with an older population. And the young population of
Saudi Arabia is one of the factors why so many Saudis are active on social media
compared to other countries. Around 75% of the population are owning a smartphone and
35% are really active on social media, and active in this case means that they log in
to their social media accounts at least once every month. 25% of the population
are active users on Facebook and 20% of the population are active on Twitter, and
Saudi Twitter users account for 40% of all Twitter users and the whole Arab world,
and that's a lot of people. And if you can't remember any of these statistics
right now, never mind. The important thing to take away from this is the population
of Saudi Arabia is very young and most of them are active on
social media and on the Internet. And now that we are all excited about the
widespread use of social media in Saudi Arabia, let's have a look at Saudi
Arabia's cybercrime law. Saudi Arabia cybercrime law was instated in 2007 and
the law specifies what is seen as a cybercrime and which crimes are met with
which punishments. And most of the articles are just what you would expect
from the cybercrime law, but have a look at article 6 at paragraph 1 that you can
see here. It says there at the end that a cyber crime is, like... actions on the
Internet are considered a cyber crime if they are a threat to public order,
religious values, public morals, or privacy, and then article 7 focuses on
cyber crimes in relation to terrorism, or being active on the Internet in regards to
terrorism. And as you can probably imagine, the problem here is that these
are super vague terms that are not really defined, which means that any judge can
give his own interpretation of what he thinks qualifies as a cyber crime, what he
thinks is a threat to public safety or to public morals. In 2011 the cybercrime law
was overhauled and the Saudi government introduced
new rules and regulations, so that now internet newspapers and also bloggers had
to obtain a license from the Ministry of Culture and Information. And in 2014 the
cybercrime law was overhauled once again, so that now the Saudi authorities could
also take legal action against social networking sites like Twitter, because
they would allow accounts to be active that would supposedly promote adultery,
homosexuality, and atheism. And Saudi authorities are also trying to regulate
the content of YouTube channels. And now you would think that something that is
called cybercrime law is used to actually chase and catch and convict the bad guys,
and the cybercrime law actually does that. In July this year a Saudi man was
sentenced to seven years in prison and a ten years travel ban because he was
supporting the terror organization Daesh, also called ISIS, and he had tried to
travel to Syria and also support the fighting there. But he was also convicted
of other charges. He was also convicted of charges saying that he was preparing,
storing, and sending material that would harm the public through his tweets. And
also his tweets were supposedly insulting the Saudi rulers. His cell phone was
confiscated, his Twitter account was closed, and he is forbidden to tweet for
up to five years after his release from prison. Now this is just one case, but up
until 2014 the Saudi religious police claimed that they had closed over 10,000
Twitter accounts and they had arrested plenty of users because of religious and
ethical violations. But some of the people who are prosecuted under the Saudi
cybercrime law are actually just liberal activists. They are young people who try
to form a movement. They want to be outspoken on the Internet. They want to
campaign and push for change. And now we're going to meet some of them. First up
is Ashraf Fayadh. He is an artist and a poet and he was arrested and sentenced
because of apostasy, because of things that he supposedly said on Twitter and in
one of his books. And when police failed to bring proof of his apostasy or atheism
they said that he was arrested because he was smoking and wearing long hair. And it
is actually suspected that he was arrested because previously he had made a video of
Saudi religious police lashing a young man in public, in his home town Abha, and he
had then posted that video online. And a lot of people think that this is the real
reason why he was arrested. And his sentence has changed many times in
different appeal courts, from four years in prison and eight hundred lashes, to a
death sentence because of the supposed apostasy, and then back to eight years in
prison and eight hundred lashes. And Amnesty International classifies Fayadh as
a prisoner of conscience. As far as I know, he is still in prison today. Hamza
Kashgari is also young poet and a writer. He was arrested because of three tweets
that he had written about a fictive meeting with the
Prophet Mohammed. He was accused of blasphemy or apostasy as well, to which
the penalty is usually death under sharia law. He tried to leave the country and
claim asylum in New Zealand, but he was caught at Kuala Lumpur Airport and he was
brought back to Saudi Arabia and arrested, and he was held in prison for two years
without trial. And similar to the case of Ashraf Fayadh, the accusation of apostasy
is actually highly suspicious to be an excuse, because Kashkari was very publicly
outspoken on the internet and social media. He had supported the Arab Spring.
He was supporting pro-democracy movements in Saudi Arabia. He had criticized
authorities about mishandling the Jeddah flat disaster and other issues. And he was
released in October 2013. Mariam Al Otaibi is a young Saudi woman who was arrested
because she was very active in the movement against the male guardianship
system. And she was very active in the movement to abolish the system. As you
see, in Saudi Arabia, every woman has to have a male guardian.
And even when they are a grown ups, when they are adults. And why is that a
problem? Without the permission, or the consent, of their male legal guardians,
women cannot go to university, they cannot take up jobs, they can't go see the
doctor, they can't leave the country and a lot of other things. And the Guardian can
be their father, husband, uncle, brother, or even their son. And activist in Saudi
Arabia have fought for a very long time to abolish this male guardianship system. And
here you can see the Twitter account of Mariam Al Otaibi. You can see that she has
almost 50,000 followers. And here, in her Twitter bio, you see one of the core
hashtags of the movement in which she is active, and it's an Arabic hashtag and it
translates to "Saudi women want the abolishment of the guardianship system."
Mariam actually herself tried to flee her abusive brothers and her father, and she
moved to a different city to live her own life. And then
she was arrested at her workplace because her father had filed a runaway report. But
very soon, the charges against her changed from being a runaway to disruption of
public order because of her activism on Twitter. And her house was searched and
her cellphone and her laptop were confiscated. And after 104 days in
detention without trial, she was released in July this year. And her release was
actually deemed a very big success and a victory by Saudi feminists because she was
released from prison without the presence or the permission of a male guardian,
because usually how it works is if a woman is released from prison, her male guardian
has to pick her up. If he doesn't do that she just stays in detention. But she was
released just like that. And here you can see two designs of the Saudi artist
MsSaffaa. On the left you see a poster that she designed to support the release
of Mariam Al Otaibi from prison. The hashtag says "We are all Miriam Al
Otaibi." And on the right you see another design that she did, that is very famous
for the movement to abolish the mayor guardianship system,
and this hashtag says "I am my own guardian." Loujain AlHathloul is another
young Saudi woman who was arrested in December 2014 when she was trying to drive
her car over the border from the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia. Shortly
before, she had tweeted "follow me on Twitter to find out what will happen at
the border." And she had for a very long time been active in the woman to drive
movement. That means that she had already posted videos of herself driving in Saudi
Arabia online, showing how she was defying the ban on women driving. She live-tweeted
this whole experience of being detained at the border. Her passport was confiscated.
Her friend and lawyer, who came to her support, was also arrested, and ultimately
she was released after 73 days without trial. Raif Badawi is probably the
activists that most of you have heard of, because Amnesty International did a huge
campaign to support his release, and also his wife is very active, publicly, to
work for his release. He is a writer and an activist, and he was arrested in 2012.
He was charged of insulting Islam through electronic channels and he was brought to
court on several charges, including apostasy, and as you already know by now,
the death penalty is included when you are charged of apostasy. And similar to Ashraf
Fayadh, his sentence was changed multiple times in different appeal courts and
eventually he was sentenced to 10 years in prison
and a fine and thousand lashes, of which only the first 50 were administered,
probably because of international attention and outrage. And what got Raif
Badawi in trouble in the first place was setting up a website that was called Free
Saudi Liberals. In court he was accused of setting up a website that undermines
general security, ridiculing Islamic religious figures, and going beyond the
realm of obedience. And he was told that his website would violate Islamic values
and propagates liberal thought. And the court ordered his website to be closed and
he is still in prison today. The last activist that
we are going to look at is Muhammad Salih Al Bajadi. He was, prior to his arrest,
also very politically active. In 2009, for example, he managed a website that was
called "monitor of human rights in Saudi Arabia." And he is also the co-founder of
a Saudi Arabian human rights organization called "the Saudi Civil and Political
Rights Association." He was also arrested. His office was searched. And Amnesty
International labeled him a prisoner of conscience as well. And they said that he
was held solely for the peaceful exercise of his rights to freedom of expression,
assembly, and association. But in court, however, he was charged with insurrection
against the ruler, instigating demonstrations, and speaking with foreign
media channels. And he was sentenced to four years in prison
and a five-year ban on foreign travels. Now, even if you don't see yourself as an
activist, if you are active on social media in Saudi Arabia you can find
yourself the center of unwanted attention in just a second. There are some
conservatives who would flat-out think that being on Twitter is a sin in and of
itself, as you can see here. And just three month ago, actually, Saudi
authorities urged citizens to monitor each other and to report posts on social media
that would harm the state's reputation. So as you can imagine, that leads to a huge
level of self-censorship. When I was living and working in Saudi Arabia, I once
talked to a work contact and I asked him why he wasn't more active on Twitter, and
he said the first day that he had signed up on Twitter, he had received a direct
message by a person he didn't know, and the message just said "welcome. We are
watching you." And when you live in Saudi Arabia and you don't use a VPN or TOR all
the time you inevitably run across a website that is blocked at some point. For
me, for example, that was the search engine StartPage. When I was trying to
access that page, I would land on a site that would look like this. And Saudi
authorities are hosting a firewall which blocks access to
thousands of websites. Actually the Saudi authorities, they openly acknowledge that
widespread filtering takes place, and they would say that it targets pornographic,
Islam related, human rights, and political sites. And as you can imagine, criticism
of the royal family and of Islamic teachings is generally not tolerated. Now,
rewind three years. Three years ago at Congress I ran into a guy named Arturo,
and he told me how he and his friends were working on this OONI project, and they
were running probes all over the world to measure the extent of filtering and
Internet censorship in different countries. And so we teamed up and we did
some measuring in Saudi Arabia. And OONI stands for Open Observatory of Network
Interference. And I would very much like Arturo to come on stage for a few minutes
and to tell you himself what OONI is all about, and how running that probe in Saudi
Arabia worked.
Arturo: Thank you Miriam
*applause*
Arturo: So, yeah. As ??? three years ago we met and
I was already working at the time on this project ??????????? for the Open
Observatory of Network Interference. What we do is we're a community mass project
I guess that does network measurements with
??? of what we call "network interference" or "network
?????????." That can be a sign of internet censorship or surveillance
And we do this for a variety of different ????????? look into the blocking of
websites such as the one we saw in the previous slide in Saudi Arabia. But also
whether or not circumvention tools like tor, VPNs work or do not work or whether
or not and how instant messaging apps are blocked or not blocked around the world
and we do this through some apps that can be installed either on your mobile phone
or on your computer and these are run by tens of thousands of volunteers around the
world to gather evidence of internet censorship around the world.
I guess I will not go too much into what OONI does because we actually have an
assembly on the third floor where you-- called the OONIverse and you are welcome
to come by and we can tell you all about it but also we have a longer presentation
on the third day at 2:30 in borg room and there I can go more into what OONI is
about and how we have been working with people like Miriam to collect sort of
undeniable evidence that internet censorship is happening but also how.
Miriam: Perfect thank you very much. I would very much suggest that you go and
see that talk as well.
*applause*
So apart from the websites that you would expect to be
blocked in Saudi Arabia like porn and gambling websites or the website of the
Israeli Secret Service there are plenty of other websites that are blocked and OONI
has compiled a very huge and comprehensive list of different websites that are
blocked in Saudi Arabia that you can find on their website and I brought you three
short examples just to show you what kind of websites could be blocked.
On the left you always see the information that is provided on the OONI web page and
on the right side you see a screenshot of the actual web site that is blocked in
Saudi Arabia. So first up we have Al- Manar, Al-Manar is a news media web site
with ties to Hezbollah. Second we have bahai.org, the Bahai­ are a religious
group, they are a religious minority and they are oppressed in pretty much all of
the Arab countries. You can see that actually their website is also blocked in
the United Kingdom and in Italy for whatever reason. And thirdly we have
proxify.com, it's just one of many examples of different websites that offer
services of anonymity and of circumvention. And now because I don't
want to leave you too depressed when you leave this talk I also want to look at
some positive things that have happened as well because despite all this persecution
that I have talked about up until now activists in Saudi Arabia have been able to
secure some very important victories in the past years and if you have followed
the news lately a little bit then maybe you have noticed that a lot of things are
happening in Saudi Arabia, a lot of laws and traditions are changing and because of
time restraints I'm only focusing on two issues here right now that I personally
find especially important. So the first example are the Saudi
municipal elections in 2015 these were the very first elections when women in Saudi
Arabia were allowed to actively and passively participate in the elections and
in the end 20 women were elected to municipal councils out of 2,000 seats that
were open in these elections and women had to overcome incredible hurdles to
participate or to be candidates. For example, organizations that were set up to
educate women about the elections to help them to run as candidates and to tell them
how to register these organizations were forbidden. Female candidates weren't
allowed to hold public rallies, they were not allowed to give speeches online, in
TV, in public. They were not allowed to post pictures of
their faces put them on posters or post them anywhere really. So women were
basically confined to campaigning online really and especially registering as
candidates but also as voters was super hard some women were flat-out denied being
registered without being given any reason but one problem that also the men actually
had one problem was that voters in order to be registered they had to bring proof
of their residency and they would usually prove that by showing a rental contract.
Now the problem is that women cannot produce a rental contract because their
names are not on these contracts but the names of their fathers or their husbands.
That's just one of the many problems they had and this is one example from YouTube
because up until now I have talked a lot about Twitter but there's also a huge and
thriving and very important YouTube scene in Saudi Arabia and the following video is
by a famous Saudi YouTube group and they are called Telfaz11 and they have a
regular show that is called ??? and this clip is actually part from one of
their shows and they produced this video mocking how women were organizing and how
women had to work so hard to just participate in these elections while men
were just lazy and enjoying their privileges and now let's see if this
works.
So that's just one example. I like them very much because they have a very fine
sense of where the red lines are and how much fun they can actually make of the
government and of actual problems that persevere in Saudi Arabia. And then we
have another example, three months ago the Saudi King announced that he would lift
the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia and starting from May next year women
would be for the first time ever be-- oh not for first time ever, for the first
time in a long time they would be allowed to drive cars in Saudi Arabia, and
activists had campaigned for this change they had campaigned for the lift of the
ban on women driving for a long time for many years that's a long story I don't
have that much time as I want to to talk to you about it but we have one example
here one out of many and this is a music video from 2013 and this went viral in
Saudi Arabia and they were supporting the campaign by the women to drive movement
who were trying to get the ban lifted and in their music video they are making fun
of the baseless arguments that were used to justify the driving ban, why women were
not allowed to drive cars and the context for the fall of 2013 is that at this time,
a lot of women were defying the ban on women driving, they were driving around,
they were filming themselves while doing it, they were posting all these videos
online a lot of women were arrested yet more women were driving around and yeah
that was just one of the videos that came out at that time, I also want to show it
to you.
All right just wanted to show you this short short part but the whole video is really
ridiculous you have to look it up you're gonna find it on YouTube. And so you know
the story eventually after many years of activism the ban on women driving was
lifted just now. The work, the really hard work of all the activists is just one of
many aspects why it was lifted but we have to appreciate this and here you see some
of the reactions of women in Saudi Arabia being super happy about this development.
And so final thoughts, what can we learn from all of this? I would say one thing
that we can learn from it is the government is not your friend. Whatever
technology is at their disposal they will use and they will not only use it to catch
terrorists and put them in prison but they will also use that technology or these
laws to also persecute activists for example or anybody whom they label as
terrorists because of this really vague terms and the cybercrime law. And that is
also why it's really important that we don't let the government put
backdoors in our safety-- like in our software anywhere because the wisdom the
government is not your friend applies to pretty much every government really if you
think about it.
*applause*
And also you have heard how the Saudi government changes laws and
seemingly becomes more modern and more liberal and tries to appease the young
population but you have to keep in mind that they are still super autocratic, it's
still an absolute monarchy and I don't think that this will change anytime soon
no matter how many news we get next year about like women-- the first woman becomes
Minister of Foreign Affairs or Saudi Crown Prince gives a speech about the importance
of freedom of religion for the economy or something like this. But still, the
government is trying to appease the younger generation and the younger folks
and that is at least something and I think one of the important aspects here is, how
do they know with what they can appease the young generation? Well they know it
because the young people keep telling them on social media all the time and they go
to jail over and over for speaking their minds for pushing for change and we have
to acknowledge this as the victory and the sacrifice that it is and it also shows us
that it makes sense to keep speaking up and to tell the government what it is that
they want and what it is that they want to change and to keep up the pressure because
the rule of the royal family rests on a rather unstable religious legitimation so
they have to make an effort to stay in the good graces of the population because they
certainly don't want to see another Arab Spring in their country.
And now I'm hoping that you can take away something from this talk and that it has
helped to-- helped you to see the Saudis in a different light so that next time
when someone talks to you about Saudi Arabia and how they are all rich beheading
bigots you can tell them well, not all Saudis and then you think of the activists
and that you appreciate the hard work that Saudi activists are doing on the ground
all the time. There's a lot more I would like to tell you but time is up. If you
are interested in this kind of subject check out some of these talks I saw the
talk "Tightening the net in Iran", it was superb, go and watch it online, see the
video, go and see the OONI talk also and lastly I would say thank you very much for
your time and your attention.
*applause*
*34c3 outro*