When Tunisia?s ?Jasmine Revolution? took the country by storm in January, one of the region?s most sophisticated censorship regimes came to an end. The wave of unrest that followed underscored the power of social media and the tools governments use to counter them.
Before the uprising, Tunisia was tied with China as the world's second worst online performer, in the2009 Freedom on the Net report, according to Robert Guerra, Director of the Internet Freedom Project at .
Many Middle Eastern governments cite the need to preserve morality and traditional ways of life to justify censorship of religious and adult sites. But activists say censorship often extends to political content.
The (CPJ) Internet Advocacy Coordinator Danny O'Brian describes the online situation in the region as an arms race between those who wish to curtail information and those seeking to spread it. This high-tech war employs increasingly sophisticated technical and non-technical tools to block information on the Internet.
"There's widespread surveillance, there's cyber warfare and technical attacks... launched against Internet users, against some of the companies that are providing services in the region," said Robert Guerra of Freedom House. "And some of it is just old fashioned repression that's taking place."
Depending on the extent of censorship, says Guerra, countries in the region range from bad to worse. There are those that filter or block websites like Saudi Arabia, or engage in harassing and arresting activists like Egypt, Bahrain, Syria and others.
In the case of Egypt, activist and blogger says police engaged in kidnapping and brutality of new and aspiring bloggers to deter them. The Committee to Protect Journalists confirms that police watched or threatened bloggers in rural areas or outside the main cities.
Online advocacy groups and bloggers say that, in extreme cases, authorities steal online user names and passwords and delete blogs - something Tunisian censors engaged in extensively before the recent ouster of the country?s former President and his government.
The simplest censorship tools include monitoring and blocking of posts or entire websites like Facebook and Twitter.
When the Saudis started blocking content a decade ago, they blocked entire websites. In some Gulf countries, users would get a message informing them that the government had deemed the site in question inappropriate. In other countries, users get no warning and can't tell if their own computer or Internet connection is malfunctioning.
But CPJ?s O?Brian says censorship has become stealthier and more sophisticated in many Middle Eastern countries.
"That means you can pluck out one video from YouTube rather than banning YouTube entirely. "So now the question here is: Is that better censorship or not?" O'Brian asked. "At least in Turkey, individual Turkish users are aware that what they're seeing has been censored by the authorities. If you have a very subtle level of blocking, that means you might never ever realize that there's a huge swath of the Net that you're forbidding from being seen."
Filtering is done by keyword, IP address and domain name to intercept undesirable chatter and block access to external sites. Countries like Egypt did not filter and only blocked websites temporarily - until recently.
Faced with massive protests demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak and his government, Egyptian authorities shut down social media sites and mobile SMS communication. Other countries followed suit as the protests spread to Yemen and Jordan.
Syrian bloggers writing to , a global online community of bloggers, note that the official media has all but kept Syrians in the dark about the turmoil outside their borders.
Libyan authorities don't bother to block internal websites. Instead, they block Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that link citizens to external servers like Google's, effectively insolating them from the world.
Morocco does very little blocking and maintains a more open online environment than most in the region. Lebanon does not filter, according to Jillian York, OpenNet Initiative Project Coordinator at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, while Saudi Arabia does less filtering than Syria. Most Gulf countries filter out pornography and social content deemed offensive to Islam.
Much of the filtering is done using U.S.-made software.