A technical review for porn ban in Egypt #EgyPornBan

A technical review for porn ban in Egypt #EgyPornBan

January 7, 2013 by Ahmed Fouad 0Comments

Porn-less or pointless?!

On Wednesday, the 7th of November 2012, ex-Egyptian Prosecutor-General Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud submitted an official letter to the ministries of telecommunications, information and the interior, ordering that measures be adopted to ban pornographic websites in Egypt based on the Egyptian court rule in 2009 , which said “Freedoms of expression and public rights should be restricted by maintaining the fundamentals of religion, morality and patriotism,” then, an anonymous government official claimed that the order was a response to the Salafi religion stream (Pure Net) campaign, which gathered for a demonstration in front of the Cairo’s High Court on the same day, calling for a real enforcement of the ban on Internet pornography.

Taken by FP (foreign policy)

 Mohamed Nour, spokesman for the Salafist (Nour) Party, welcomed the decision, and said that the ban would not impact personal and public freedoms because “Egyptian society is conservative by nature and rejects these websites.”
After that, the discussions spread through social media platforms and main stream media, between supporters and opponents for different reasons, starting with moral and financial reasons, and reaching for the political intents and motives, but we should confess that situation itself looks like an ethical norm which points to the children and teens, on the other side, not all good intents are enough to reach “utopia,” and in this article I’m going briefly through some technical points about porn ban in Egypt and some other countries which experienced a similar issue.

But first, let’s continue with the official responding from the Egyptian government…some communications experts mentioned that the cost of porn ban process is very high that it could reach up to LE 100 millions, they also said that porn ban unrealistic and worrying, and finally, The National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA) which is a part of The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) said that a ban on pornography was completely unfeasible in a statement on its website, “The issue of blocking pornography is a global issue and very complex, and the process of blocking it requires a full inventory of names of those sites which are estimated in the millions,” the statement claimed that the government had worked with internet service providers a few years ago to implement “Family Internet” options for customers, ensuring that Internet consumers have the option of blocking offensive content or pages they might want to keep away from children in their households.

A technical point of view:

The total number of all websites or the size of the World Wide Web (The Internet) is an increased continual number and very difficult to count, but there are some services that try to count from big search engines results like Google, Bing & Yahoo, while the last reported number while writing these words says that Indexed Web contains at least 12.78 billion pages (December, 2012), which Equivalent 125% of the world population! And every day the number increases with 150,000 pages “the website may contain many pages,” also by checking the last statistics about websites that have porn contents, it’s reported to be about 12% of the huge continual increased web, and The United States only, produces a new porn movie every 39 minutes!

  From this point, considering the current technologies, we should simply see that the attempts of calculating and counting porn sites – or any kind of websites – is nearly an impossible task, which by the way is an essential task for executing porn ban, regardless of the huge cost of the whole process, and that appears when checking Internet Censorship Bill in U.S. Congress or The Economic Cost of Internet Censorship in Australia.
 Now it’s the time to talk about the most famous techniques to ban porn websites, “Filtering systems” & “Blacklists” which in mentioned in (MCIT) statement “NTRA addressed internet service provider companies in Egypt. Yet, these companies expressed their inability to fully block the sites, confirming it was impossible to produce a comprehensive list of all porn sites, produced and broadcasted in millions daily.”
So, this is a hint from the Pakistani Internet and Web Scene which witness one of the largest filters in the region after China, although, stopped shortly of implementing a national blocking and filtering system on 2012 spring. Maintaining a list of all of the porn on the Internet is a non-trivial task – even Pakistan’s list of blocked sites amounts to a drop in the ocean – while implementing a nationwide filtering scheme is potentially expensive and likely to result in the collateral blocking of unrelated websites.

Saudi Arabia also uses a similar system but they are registered win international companies which are specialized in filtering and managing blocking systems, and always update the mentioned lists, also they have a web page where the citizen can use to report a non-blocked porn site, and it has thousands of daily reports, but this was one of the main reasons which put Saudi Arabia at most 10 censored countries in the world.
It must be mentioned that the filtering systems which could recognize porn contents like pictures and words – regardless of videos – and internet censorship may go wrong to ban innocent websites like what happened on 17th February 2011, when it was reported that the US had mistakenly shut down 84,000 websites, wrongfully accused of having links to child pornography during a child porn raid.

The problems and the solutions:

It’s very complicated and an international issue has not been solved yet, besides, we should be sure that prevention policy is useless, as well it could open the door for banning any website or technology in the name of religion, then to be used in political purposes like China, Iran, Indonesia, Turkey…etc, here is an example for the countries and the blocked technologies and websites, also with the solution to bypass the ban! Also that defiantly will open the doors for new black market for hacking and bypassing filters, like the illegal satellite cables which are common in Egypt, and finally we all know that the internet is not the only source for porn material, as there are many ways to watch that on computers, mobiles, portable devices and TVs, so it should be mentioned that the proportion of households using computer is approximately 49% while the proportion of households using computer is approximately 95%, so the practical solutions start from home and could use a service like “Family Internet” which need to be developed but it’s good enough to start with as it reduces access to porn sites. No extra fees are required for subscription and it allows parents to control internet at home and identify sites and programs accessed by users of youth. Also there are many free Softwares to achieve the same goals and the government could start to spread wide awareness campaigns and do training for the family to use such techniques.
Even ask the ex-Egyptian parliament delegation which went to an Arabian country to know about their experience with porn ban and found that they are still spending millions of dollars and didn’t prevent that kind of sites, nor the many ways which could bypass that like VPNs and other techniques which could be easily found online.

 Prevention policy doesn’t solve the issue, but it creates more problems and burdens to the countries which use it, and the fears are increasing in countries that are still in the first steps of democracy, of arbitrariness in the use and abuse the opposition… while awareness campaigns need to be supported by the state, and Internet services need to be observed by the family as it is a double-edged sword.

I hope that I have explained a little bit of facts on the subject of blocking Internet sites in general and blocking pornographic sites in particular. Share your view and  comment below!