Bahrain blocks access to Al Jazeera and continues to ban websites and penalise via Internet!

London – Bahrain Press Association June 4, 2017: Last week, Bahrain banned media and press websites, including the Qatari Al-Jazeera’s website, due to political differences between the two countries.

Bahraini browsers can no longer access the Al-Jazeera channel and Qatari newspapers websites except by proxy browsing.

Bahrain bans dozens of websites and the local list has doubled after the crisis. The authorities ban websites including political association pages, the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, Bahrain Mirror newspaper, Pearl channel website, and others.

Bahrain uses the ban as a weapon to counter the opposing opinions. Since the launch of the Bahrain Mirror website in May 2011, which is an electronic newspaper close to the opposition, it was constantly blocked and banned. Moreover, the government chased the webmasters who have been subjected to a retaliatory campaign.

In March 2015, Reporters without Borders Organization selected the Mirror website amongst 9 websites around the world to unblock it as part of the “cloud freedom” campaign against countries described as the “enemies of the Internet”.

More than a year ago, Bahrain has banned the Telegram program, which is a Russian chat application, because the government is unable to subject the application to surveillance like other applications.

The US State Department in its annual report confirmed that the Bahraini government restricts the freedom of the Internet and monitors the activities of individuals on the Internet and social media, which causes the deterioration of Internet and mobile services.

In order to have more control on the e-content, the authorities have forced Internet service providers to purchase a unified technical system to block websites and link it to a centralized system run by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), which is the government authority to issue telecommunications companies’ licences and organize their work.

The system allows the government to ban any website in a short period, without having to notify or ask the telecommunication companies, making the process easier and making it more difficult to bypass or fraud.

Freedom House says that although major ISPs tend to comply with security agencies’ requests, the TRA has revoked the license of a small Internet service provider (ISP) for lack of adequate monitoring capabilities.

The Bahraini government invented the Internet penalty earlier this year, when it stopped the publishing of the independent newspaper al-Wasat for the first time after accusing it of “publishing material threatening national unity” before retreating this decision few days later!