Saudi snitching app appears to have been used against jailed Leeds student | Saudi Arab... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...-leeds-student-salma-al-shehab
twitter censorship KSA Saudi rights authoritarianism repression student UK Britain
shared by Ed Webb on 17 Aug 22
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The Saudi woman who was sentenced to 34 years in prison for using Twitter appears to have been denounced to Saudi authorities through a crime-reporting app that users in the kingdom can download to Apple and Android phones.
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The user told Shehab that he had reported her on the Saudi app, which is called Kollona Amn, or All Are Safe. It is not clear whether the Saudi officials responded directly to the report, but the 34-year-old mother was arrested two months later.
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Her alleged crimes including using a website to “cause public unrest” and “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts” and by retweeting their tweets.
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on 8 October 2019, Shehab responded to a tweet by a verified Saudi account that reports on developments in the kingdom’s infrastructure projects. When the account tweeted about the launch of a new network of buses, she tweeted the word “finally!”.
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Recalling her own experience in Syria, Aljizawi described the phenomenon of citizens being unable to trust their own neighbours.“Sometimes people find themselves in trouble. They need a promotion or need to prove their loyalty to the state, so they do something like this. It’s enough to just take a screenshot and report it,”
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On official Saudi websites, Kollona Amn – which also has a Twitter account – is described as an app that allows citizens and expatriates to submit security and criminal reports related to personal life attacks, threats, impersonation, extortion, penetration of social media accounts, defamation, fraud and other criminal offences and security reports.
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“It is very concerning because people who post something cannot predict the risk or who is going to report them, and who is going to go back and search their feed for posts that don’t align with government propaganda,”
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in the hands of a dictatorship targeting human rights defenders, technology transforms into a terrifying tool which fast tracks repression
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Shehab would regularly tweet to support the rights of others but believed it went unnoticed because she did not have many Twitter followers.“She [would] always stand with all human rights in Saudi or outside of Saudi
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Shehab, who has been studying in the UK since 2017, was not especially critical of the government and was a supporter of Vision 2030, Prince Mohammed’s plan to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil and towards services such as health and tourism.