[iwar] [fc:Two.years.ago,.Saad.al-Fagih.had.a.hard.time.spreading.his.anti-government.message...]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-24 10:45:10
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Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 10:45:10 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Two.years.ago,.Saad.al-Fagih.had.a.hard.time.spreading.his.anti-government.message...]
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Online Agitators Breaching Barriers In Mideast 
By Michael Dobbs, Washington Post, 10/24/2001
<a href="http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171443.html">http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171443.html>

Two years ago, Saad al-Fagih had a hard time spreading his
anti-government message to people in Saudi Arabia. He had to rely
largely on smuggling in videocassettes and audiotapes. But now the
London-based Saudi dissident is in frequent "live" contact with his
followers back home through Internet Web sites, chat rooms and virtual
lectures. 
From his home in the north London suburb of Cricklewood, al-Fagih gives
twice-a-week lectures through live Internet voice hookups. Hundreds of
people in Saudi Arabia log on to listen, he said. They can raise their
hands electronically to ask questions, almost as if they were seated in
the same lecture room. Traffic on his group's Web site has increased
over the past year about fivefold, with many of the newcomers from
within Saudi Arabia. 
Across town, in the west London suburb of Acton, a radical Muslim cleric
sentenced to life imprisonment on terrorism charges in Jordan is using
the Internet to echo Osama bin Laden's calls for jihad, or holy war.
Like al-Fagih, Abu Qatada relies on an American Web site, paltalk.com,
to put him in two-way voice contact with groups of followers in the
Middle East. 
Modern-day communications technologies are helping dissidents such as
these two undermine controls that authoritarian rulers in the Middle
East have traditionally placed on the flow of information. It is not
clear how many people are logging in from each country. But there is no
doubt that along with satellite television, cell phones and fax
machines, the Internet has vastly increased the potential audience for
foreign-based opposition groups and is helping make a mockery of
censorship regulations. 
Nowhere is the change more striking than in Saudi Arabia, which first
permitted mass access to the Internet in 1999 and has been trying ever
since to block pornographic and "subversive" sites. Saudi dissidents say
the Riyadh government is using filtering technology, but still has
little control over the Internet habits of the roughly 600,000 people
who use the global network in the kingdom of about 20 million. 
"This is an unwinnable war" for the Saudi government, said al-Fagih, a
leader of the opposition Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, as he
sat at a computer, moving from one Arabic-language chat room to another,
scanning a flood of messages deeply critical of the U.S.-backed Saudi
royal family. "Saudi leaders want Saudi Arabia to become part of the
global economy, but they want the country to remain closed culturally
and politically. There's no way you can do that anymore." 
Traditionally one of the world's most closed societies, Saudi Arabia has
used some of its oil wealth to create one of the more educated
populations in the Arab world, as well as a sophisticated
telecommunications infrastructure. 
Since unifying the country in the 1920s and 1930s, the ruling House of
Saud has sought to keep itself in power through a combination of
political repression, lavish spending on airports, schools and other
civil projects, and an alliance with the country's conservative
religious hierarchy. Although it worked effectively for more than a
half-century, this unwritten social contract is now in jeopardy,
according to Saudi dissidents and independent political analysts. 
Living standards of ordinary Saudis have dropped sharply over the past
decade, because of corruption and falling oil revenue, and it is
becoming increasingly difficult for Saudi rulers to keep their people
isolated from the rest of the world. 
Eric Goldstein of Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based lobbying and research
group, said that Middle East governments know they are fighting "a
losing-cat-and-mouse game" to control the flow of information to their
citizens. 
"Governments have tried to buy time by attempting to monitor e-mail,
block Web sites, and generally scare people that the Internet is not a
secure way to communicate," Goldstein said. "But there is a high
political cost associated with trying to restrict the flow of
information. The middle class, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, regards
satellite dishes and Internet connections as a standard perquisite of
middle-class life." 
When Saudi authorities first permitted mass Internet use two years ago,
they channeled all traffic through a single server, or central computer,
at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Riyadh. They
also used technology from a U.S.-based company, Websense, to list and
filter out 30 categories of potentially unsuitable sites. Saudi
government regulations published last February make it an offense to
access Web sites containing any material "contrary to the state or its
system." 
While the filtering system proved reasonably effective at screening out
pornographic pictures, it had greater difficulty identifying
objectionable political information. (Blocking sites that contain the
phrase Osama bin Laden, for example, would mean shutting off access to
sites containing comments supportive of the fugitive Saudi millionaire
as well as sites with material opposing him.) 
Saudi dissidents have devised a simple method for circumventing attempts
to block access to al-Fagih's Web site (its English language version is
at www. islah.org/english.htm). When the site is blocked, they adjust
the Internet address slightly, using one of 60,000 permutations. A user
in Saudi Arabia is able to get the latest address for the site by
sending a blank e-mail to an address that gives an automatic response
within a minute or two. 
By using U.S. e-mail services such as Hotmail or Yahoo and logging on to
the opposition Web sites via an "anonymizer" site such as Safeweb, which
wipes away information about the user, Saudi citizens are able to keep
their identities secret from the authorities. 
During a recent chat room session, al-Fagih exchanged derogatory
information about the Saudi royal family with a series of correspondents
in Saudi Arabia identified only by names such as "cool guy" and
"dreamer." 
The chat rooms have become so popular that they are also used by Saudi
authorities to spread counter-propaganda about the dissident movement.
"This man is a police agent," said al-Fagih, bringing up a message from
"Tarik2001" quoting a nonexistent Washington Post report stating that
"Saudi dissident Saad al-Fagih has died in a car accident in London." 
Experts contend the Internet reaches fewer people in the Middle East
than satellite television. Spearheading the information revolution, by
most accounts, is the Arabic-language TV channel al-Jazeera, which
claims 35 million viewers. 
While the Internet cannot compete with television in numbers of viewers,
it offers dissident groups a much more targeted audience. And in any
case, al-Fagih says he rarely appears on al-Jazeera because his
outspoken criticisms of the Saudi royal family are too controversial for
the Qatar-based station, which has to play a delicate political game
with Riyadh. On the Internet, however, he is free to say what he likes. 
Islamic terrorist groups have also been quick to discover the power of
the Internet, and particularly e-mail, to propagate ideas of holy war.
In some cases, according to U.S. investigators, the Internet has been
used to send coded instructions from bin Laden's headquarters in
Afghanistan to agents of his al Qaeda network in the field. 
According to Yasser al-Sirri, director of the London-based Islamic
Observation Center, which has publicized statements by bin Laden, when
al Qaeda agents have a message they want to deliver, they often walk out
of Afghanistan -- one of the few countries in the world virtually shut
off from the network -- in search of an Internet connection. 
The statements are e-mailed from a border town in Pakistan to
sympathizers in such Western countries as Britain, then relayed to the
mainstream news media. 
Statements such as one last week by bin Laden's top military commander,
Mohammed Atef, threatening that U.S. forces in Afghanistan would suffer
a fate similar to those in Somalia in 1993, are also circulated through
hundreds of pro-bin Laden chat rooms, many of them hosted by American
servers. 
Police this morning arrested al-Sirri at his west London home and
confiscated his computer equipment. Police sources said the decision to
detain al-Sirri, who has been sentenced to death in absentia in Egypt
for an assassination plot, was based in part on his organization's role
in relaying Atef's statements.

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Next message: Tony Bartoletti: "Re: [iwar] How big is Al Queda?"
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