Riyadh Al-Balushi

I cannot really claim that I was surprised when I heard that the Ministry of Culture and Information of Saudi had declared its intentions to pass an amendment to its law regulating publications so that it extends its scope to cover web publication in a way that will require all website owners, bloggers, and forum administrators to register their websites with the Ministry of Culture and Information. I was shocked, but I was not surprised to hear that come from Saudi. Fortunately for our Saudi neighbours after the web went mad over this announcement, the Saudi government reached to international news agencies denying that the new amendment will cover blogs and forums and that it will only extend to news related websites.
In the original announcement of the new amendment the Ministry of Culture and Information claimed that the new regulation is intended to help protect the Saudi public and does not intend to restrict the freedom of expression. The statements made by the official spokesperson on TV explicitly mention blogs and forums, so we do not know if it is safe to believe that the regulations will only cover news related websites.

It is very difficult to imagine how this upcoming regulation would be able to distinguish between news related “websites” and blogs. There is no technical definition of what a blog is – it is obviously a website, and it can be dedicated to publishing blog posts about news, so what that make it a news related website? Or would blogs written in a personal capacity with no commercial interest be excluded on that basis? We do not know, what we know for sure is that freedom of expression cannot be seriously enforced or even promoted when you require anonymous individuals to disclose their personality and register their names and addresses with the government. It is clear that the motive of the law is to make it easy to catch anyone who writes something improper on the internet.

I think it is reasonable to regulate websites when they relate to a specific industry in a specific region, for example, the sale of pharmaceuticals should be regulated whether offline or online. The law should be amended (if needed) to address the change of technology in the way those activities are conducted. However, there are certain aspects of our lives which have been totally revolutionized by the internet and the principles by which they had been governed just do not work anymore in this new web based reality. You still should be able to hold people accountable, but governments will not be able to stop people from publishing what they think and sharing that thought with other people. This ease at which communication is spread over the internet is a fundamental aspect of it and that cannot be stopped without rendering the internet totally unusable.

Creating a culture of accountability does not necessarily mean censorship and restricted access, this culture can be reached if we put clear rules in place that specify the rights and responsibilities of each one of us and have these rights examined and enforced in courts of law that are impartial and just.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

The TRA has published a public consultation paper declaring its intention to regulate the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) in Oman. The new regulations would require corporates to apply for a permit to use VPN and would completely prohibit the use of VPN by consumers.
A VPN is a secure private network accessible through a public connection – it is widely used by businesses to exchange information between their external branches using public internet services while having all that information securely tunnelled through the VPN.

Besides the straightforward use of VPNs by businesses, the use of VPN by consumers has increased over the years either to avoid ISP censorship or to access geographically-restricted web services from a non-qualifying location (e.g. Hulu and the BBC iPlayer).

In countries like Oman where the internet is censored, VPN technologies can be used to bypass this censorship. The majority of consumer users of VPN in Oman use it to overcome the prohibition of using unlicensed VoIP services such as Skype. This is possible through VPN as users can use their restricted connection to tunnel all their communications through a private network that is connected to an unrestricted ISP service on the other end. So as long as the user can connect to the VPN, all restrictions imposed by the ISP become irrelevant.

The draft regulations of the TRA clearly attempt to stop consumers from bypassing the various restrictions imposed on the internet in Oman, the regulations seem to acknowledge the need for businesses to use VPN to securely communicate as any business can apply for a permit, however, the TRA will still retain the right to reject any request by a company to use VPN if the TRA is not convinced of its need to use VPN. Consumers may be fined up to RO 500 if they are discovered to use VPN.

The upcoming ban of VPN will upset a lot of people, but it is hard to argue against this specific new regulation as the majority of consumer uses of VPN in Oman involve carrying out prohibited activities (e.g. using VoIP). However, that is not to say that VPN doesn’t have any legitimate uses by consumers at all. VPN is used by universities are abroad to provide students with access to the university’s network when they are abroad, this is fundamental for students on distance learning programs or those doing a research in Oman. Many universities subscribe to countless electronic academic journals which can only be accessed through a secure connection as required by the publishers of these journals. Students may also need to connect through a VPN to submit their assignments to the electronic blackboard system or any other electronic learning system.

Besides the need for students on distance learning programs to use VPN, the wide definition of the term “VPN” in the new regulations could be problematic as it will capture any instance where a private network is created over a public connection, for example, remote access technologies such as ones that would allow you to retrieve files from your desktop computer through your phone would fall under this definition as you have to establish a private network with your computer over the public internet connection to do this process. Some gaming services could fall under this definition as well as a “private” network would have to be established to enable the players to play against each other.

There is no doubt that the prohibition of VPN is inline with the country’s general policy on the prohibition of encryption tools and the way the internet has been regulated this far, but the internet has developed in a way that makes security and encryption fundamental aspects of many new applications. Attempting to strictly regulate all these technologies that involve encryption could render the internet in Oman seriously crippled if this regulation goes too far.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

BlackBerry phones are different from other mobile handsets because RIM, the manufacturer of these phones, provides, in addition to the hardware, a special service infrastructure that allows users to share instant messages and e-mails easily through a very secure platform. This high level of security, along with the ease with which messages can be composed on BlackBerry devices, has made BlackBerry very popular in the business world.
However, this same popularity of BlackBerry devices, and the high level of security they provide, has recently stirred up many issues of national security in a number of neighbouring countries such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and even India, as even network operators are not able to intercept the messages exchanged by BlackBerry devices. This is especially because governments worry that terrorists may take advantage of these secure communication methods to plan their activities.

Communication is protected in the majority of countries around the world, and network operators are not allowed to eavesdrop on the communications of their users, but courts in any country would be entitled under certain conditions to make an order to intercept communications of some individuals on various grounds such as national security.

The problem with BlackBerry devices is that the messages of their consumers are routed through the servers of the company in Canada, and any court order in the UAE or in Saudi would not directly have an effect in Canada, due to legal jurisdiction issues.

It is not exactly clear what governments such as those in the UAE and Saudi want. RIM offers a number of services, one of which is the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, used by companies and governments to communicate using a high level of security, which RIM itself cannot decrypt as the data would go through the servers of each company that subscribes to the service.

The other service more commonly used by consumers is the BlackBerry Internet Server, which provides a lower level of security that RIM is able to decrypt if asked to do so.

The governments of the UAE and Saudi are in talks with RIM, and they seem to have requested local servers for users registered in each country. This would ensure that if a court of law orders the communication to be intercepted, the order can be fulfilled.It is still unknown whether an agreement has been reached, as no official statement regarding the recent status of the ban has been made.

Looking at the issue from the perspective of national security, it is reasonable for any country to seek to have that level of insurance available in the case of an emergency. However, the truth is that BlackBerry is only one of the many available methods of communication which cannot be intercepted by local service providers. E-mail, instant messaging and all sorts of other web-based communication are encrypted and routed through servers located all over the world.

It would be unrealistic to ban every single method of secure communication or to ask every company to establish servers for local users in every country, especially as it might not be commercially viable for international businesses to establish local servers in small markets such as ours. The solution to this problem is not an easy one. Regulators should assess the impact strict regulation could have on innovations that could be built on these communication methods and must consider the benefits these communication methods provide to small businesses and society at large.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

The worst thing about online piracy is not that it harms musicians and game developers, but that it normalizes the act of breaking the law without any sense of guilt. We all know that it is illegal to download a copyright work without paying for it, and we all know that by taking this action we somehow harm the owner of that work one way or another, yet the majority of people nowadays will not think twice about downloading anything on the internet and they have no moral issues on a personal level with it. A lot of people consider it a ridiculous to pay for computer software at all now that you can download anything you want free of charge if you look in the right places and feel entitled to have it.
Society here cannot relate to authors of copyright works because the majority of people are consumers who never created any intellectual product of significant consumer value nor do they know anyone who personally has. People are not afraid of breaking the law, because they know they cannot ever get sued or caught.

It’s not the mere act of illegally downloading files on the internet that makes people pirates, but their absolute belief that the law is meaningless and is of no impact at all on their daily lives.

A part of this can be attributed to the lack of awareness of the impact piracy has on the development of any economy based on intellectual property and the continuation of our society as one that consumes without producing anything in return, but the situation is also attributed to the disconnect between copyright law and current social values. Copyright law was developed for old industries in which works can be properly consumed and shared while respecting the principles of the “copy”-right, but these principles cannot be properly applied in a new world where every single use of a digital work involves creating a copy on the system that attempts to play that work.

We need copyright law in order to provide an incentive for authors to produce new creative works, but the law must be updated to provide users with appropriate exemptions to consume copyright works in a realistic manner while providing sufficient incentives for the authors to continue to create. Such exemptions should be the right to shift the format of the work, the right to remix the work, and the right to create parodies of the work.

In order for society to start respecting copyright, owners of those copyright works would have to realize that old business models might not necessarily work in a new digital environment, and new models, which may or may not include providing a free ad-supported alternative of the service, can create better chances for supporting the artists.

It is not easy for any one country to update its copyright law primarily due to international obligations that require a minimum standard of protection for copyright works (such as those provided in the Berne Convention), but accepting that the law has a problem is the first step in the process for creating the solution.