are widely known to practice filtering. These countries, which include Syria, Tunisia, Vietnam,
Uzbekistan, Oman, and Pakistan, block an expansive range of topics with considerable depth.
Ethiopia is a more recent entrant into this category, having extended its censorship of political
opposition into cyberspace.
Azerbaijan, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, and Tajikistan filter sparingly, in some cases as
little as one Web site or a handful of sites. The evidence for Belarus and Kazakhstan remains
inconclusive at the time of this writing, though blocking is suspected in these countries.
Of equal interest are the states included in testing in 2006 in which no evidence of filtering
was uncovered (see table 1.1). We make no claims to have proven the absence of filtering in
these countries. However, our background research supports the conclusion drawn from the
technical testing that none of these states are currently filtering Internet content.
4
Later in the book we turn our attention to the question of why some countries filter and
others do not, even under similar political and cultural circumstances.
Figure 1.1
Comparing the breadth and depth of filtering. AE—United Arab Emirates; BH—Bahrain; CN—China;
ET—Ethiopia; IR—Iran; JO—Jordan; KR—South Korea; LY—Libya; MM—Burma/Myanmar; OM—
Oman; PK—Pakistan; SA—Saudi Arabia; SD—Sudan; SY—Syria; TH—Thailand; TH—Tunisia; UZ—
Uzbekistan; VN—Vietnam; YE—Yemen. A number of countries that filter a small number of sites are
omitted from this diagram, including Azerbaijan, Belarus, India, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Singapore,
and Tajikistan.
8
Robert Faris and Nart Villeneuve