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 subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2018. Join, and help us!