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‘The Circumventor’ Awarded for Arab Anti-Censorship Software

Yemeni developer of software to circumvent online censors wins prestigious TED fellowship.

A Yemeni academic who developed software that allows netcitizens throughout the world to circumvent government censorship of websites has become the lone Arab to be awarded a prestigious fellowship by the non-profit international innovation organization TED.

Walid Al-Saqaf, a Yemeni computer engineer and Ph.D candidate, is the developer of Alkasir (Arabic for ‘the circumventor’). This free software program allows Internet users to circumvent the censorship of websites deemed objectionable by local governments.

Al-Saqaf is one of 22 people from various countries selected from a pool of over 800 candidates to speak at TED’s annual conference, set to be held in the United Kingdom in July. He is the only Arab to be selected this year and the first Yemeni and among a handful of Arabs to have been awarded the prestigious fellowship since its inception.

"It was a surprise and I didn’t think I would get it because it’s quite competitive," Al-Saqaf told The Media Line. "You don’t often have the opportunity to be in the room with presidents, prime ministers, Bill Gates, etc. So I’m really glad and it will help me connect to a bigger group of people involved in new ideas and innovations."

"What’s important to me is not the prize but that there is more attention to the issue of political and religious censorship online and how it affects the Muslim world," he said. "There is a lot of dissident activity that is being suppressed."

"The system also allows me to track which websites are blocked in which countries around the world," he said. "This in itself is both a tool for human rights advocacy and academics researching the freedom of press… if this software becomes the norm, governments will be quite worried."

The annual TED Conference brings together leading global thinkers and donors to make 18 minute presentations which are then made available online. Speakers have included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Attendance requires an annual membership fee of $6,000.

Al-Saqaf, who was also awarded the 2010 Democracy Prize by Örebro University in Sweden earlier this year, said he developed Alkasir out of necessity.

Originally the founder of YemenPortal.net, the Arab world’s first country-specific aggregator of online news, opinion and video content, Al Saqaf developed the Alkasir circumvention software after the Yemeni government blocked his online portal.

"It started as an idea to circumvent the censorship of my own website," he recalled. "But then the government was able to find ways to eliminate the effectiveness of site-specific circumvention tools I set up so I had to think of more sophisticated solutions. I decided to develop an entire software platform to allow for more robust circumventing."

"The problem was that most programs available in the past were mainly focused on assuring the anonymity of the Internet user," Al-Saqaf said. "My main concern was average people all over the world who are unable to access the content they need – for example a journalist trying to get access to a press release from an opposition group."

"What’s unique about Alkasir is the circumvention process is launched in the background without the user noticing," he explained. "It’s called split tunneling: Let’s say that a website is blocked. Without the user noticing, this software uses a proxy server to get access to the blocked website within the same browser that the user is using. At the same time, circumvention using a proxy server makes the Internet user anonymous. On a shopping website that wants to know where you are before it allows you to buy something, for example, anonymity can create problems. One of the advantages of Alkasir is it only circumvents when needed to get around censors, so that if you go to an uncensored website that wants to know where you are coming from, no problem."

Al-Saqaf says he plans to make the data collected by the software available to media freedom researchers and advocates. He said he was in the process of releasing a new version of Alkasir, including a built-in browser with a dual Arabic/English interface.

Nabil Dajani, Chairman of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and a professor of communications at the American University in Beirut, framed Al-Saqaf’s invention as one play in an endless game of cat and mouse.

"There are fantastic developments in technology, enabling people to both maintain and evade censorship," he told The Media Line. "So you have an ongoing game of tug of war between those who are trying to implement censorship and those who are trying to get around it."

"It’s not really something new," Al-Saqaf said. "Online censorship is quite common and perhaps higher in the Arab world, but you have this phenomenon all over the world."

Gaith Saqer, Founder and Editor of ArabCrunch, which seeks to provide objective coverage of startups, technology and social media in the Arab world, argued that the popularity of circumvention software varies widely.

"Not everyone tries to get around censorship, and lots of people don’t even know how," he told The Media Line. "It really depends how much filtering is going on. If the country filters lots of useful sites, then the news of how to get around it spreads."

Online censorship is rampant throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa and international studies of press freedom and civil liberties consistently find the region to be the most repressive on earth.

The most recent study, Freedom in the World 2010, found Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco and the Palestinian Territories to have suffered a serious deterioration of civil liberties over the past year, with growing censorship, restrictions on freedom of association and harassment of bloggers and journalists.

"The situation that we have in most of the Arab world is that there are no real independent media outlets so there are rarely stories about corruption or human rights abuses," Anthony Mills, Press Freedom Manager at the International Press Institute, told The Media Line. "Over the last 10 years, many of the Arab world’s rulers have woken up rather fast to the fact that the flow of information on the Internet is basically a threat so they find themselves playing a game of cat and mouse with bloggers and journalists who try to pass on information to the outside world."

"So this kind of software is very welcome to bloggers and journalists across the Arab world," he said. "But at the same time it poses a significant threat to Arab rulers."

Lucie Morillon, director the new media desk at Reporters Without Borders, said Al-Saqaf had made an important contribution to the ability of netcitizens to access information freely.

"The Internet has become a new open space discussion in many countries where the mainstream media is under the control of the government," she told The Media Line when Al-Saqaf won the Swedish award. "In countries where websites are blocked that deal with sensitive social issues or criticism of the government, the Internet has become an essential tool of gaining access to information forbidden by the government. So access to these kinds of circumvention tools is absolutely essential for people in such countries to have a voice but also to just get information about their own countries."

"We’ve seen the emergence of a very active online community in the Arab world," Morillon added. "So women who want to discuss contraception issues in Saudi Arabia, for example, have to use these kinds of circumvention tools to discuss these issues that affect their daily lives. You also have many bloggers in countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Bahrain and the UAE trying to circumvent censorship to get out information that is forbidden by the government."