'Kollona Amn': An Application That MBS Dedicated for Declarations and Caused the Arrest of a Saudi Researcher

Despite the significant "shallow" shift in Saudi Arabia's system of dealings with them, during the reign of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), women suffer from contradictory situations between allegations of empowerment in exchange for violations of their rights.

Saudi Arabia holds up a banner of "women's empowerment," which has not officially exceeded allowing them to drive, and links women's human rights to equal wages, health, and education, without their rights to freedom of opinion and expression.

The harsh sentencing of Saudi activist Salma al-Shehab to 34 years in prison and a travel ban of 34 years like her (a 68-year sentence) for tweets was a scandalous example of this duality or contradiction between the slogans of "women's empowerment" and the reality of arresting and imprisoning dozens of women.

The horrific incidents of torture previously reported by the Washington Post on February 19, 2019, against women activists in Saudi Arabia have not deterred the authorities and are still ongoing, according to activists who have emerged from prison and human rights organizations.

Activists said that Abu Jahl, during the reign of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), did not commit such crimes, saying, "So that the Arabs do not say that we terrorize the women of Muhammad's followers," so how would this savagery take place now with women, wonders the activists.

The case of Shehab is strange because this harsh punishment is the longest sentence in the crackdown overseen by MBS in five years, the BBC website reported on August 18, 2022.

Salma al-Shehab was working on completing her PhD in the UK, and when she returned to Saudi Arabia to visit her family, she was summoned a few weeks after her visit to be arrested and tried for using Twitter to express her views.

Her alleged crimes include using a website to "foment public unrest" and "helping those who seek to destabilize civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts" and retweeting their tweets.

 

Informant Application

The importance of Shehab's case is that her arrest exposed the electronic escalation of MBS's committees and security agencies to those who write on social networking sites through the application We Are All Security (Kollona Amn), which is a new era of slander, digital tyranny and mass surveillance of Saudis.

This "Saudi informant application," as the British newspaper The Guardian called it, August 17, 2022, has enabled the authority to digitally repress Saudi citizens, including women, at the local and international levels.

The Guardian revealed that the Kollona Amn app is the reason behind Shehab's reporting and then arresting and sentencing her after returning to Saudi Arabia to visit her family.

A review of the tweets and interactions of Shehab, a PhD student at the University of Leeds, shows that she received a letter from someone using a Saudi account on November 15, 2020, after she posted a critical tweet in response to a Saudi government post regarding a new public transport contract.

Later, a user told Shehab that he had reported her on the Saudi app, We Are All Security (Kollona Amn), and two months later, she was arrested, according to the Guardian report.

Human Rights Watch also revealed that "the Saudi government is using some citizens to participate in the surveillance of critics online, through the Saudi phone application—Kollona Amn—as a tool to report any kind of criticism."

It stated that the Saudi government "is known for suppressing public dissent and has a proven record of trying to hack technological platforms, and using advanced electronic surveillance technology, to spy on dissidents."

Curiously, what led to the imprisonment of Salma al-Shehab on August 15, 2022, was that she rose up via Twitter with a tweet in defense of Palestine and its people against normalization, shaking the throne of MBS, who seeks normalization with "Israel" and sentencing her to 34 years in prison.

It caught the attention of those who reported that Shehab was putting in her account the Saudi flag with the Palestinians and also wrote tweets supporting Hezbollah and implicitly criticizing her country's (Saudi Arabia) fight against Iran in Yemen, while Tehran reconciles with Washington with the nuclear deal.

Someone wrote: "I looked at your account…I took a photo and sent it to the Kollona Amn app. If you are in Saudi Arabia, I hope you will be deported to beloved Palestine!"

Salma al-Shehab belongs to Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, is studying for her PhD at the University of Leeds, and is a lecturer at Princess Nourah University in Riyadh.

She previously appeared on Saudi television at the Riyadh Book Fair, saying that reading about history and religion could help bring together the country's various factions, perhaps in reference to the division between Sunnis and Shiites in the kingdom.

The Kollona Amn application allows citizens and expatriates to submit security and criminal reports related to attacks, threats, impersonation, extortion, hacking of social media accounts, defamation, fraud, and other criminal crimes and security reports.

 

Repressive 'Reforms'

The Saudi Interior Ministry launched the app in 2018, enabling citizens to report privacy violations online, but it practically makes MBS turn people into informants and snitches.

On August 18, 2022, a senior researcher at Canada's Citizen Lab Institute revealed to the BBC a "digital repression" of activist Salma al-Shehab.

He explained that she was arrested after an online troll threatened her and informed the Saudi authorities of her tweets through the Kollona Amn app.

The sentencing of Shehab has sparked a new wave of criticism of bin Salman's regime, comparing his claim to achieve reforms, including women's empowerment, with the atrocities his regime is committing against women in particular.

The British newspaper The Times warned on August 18: "Don't be fooled by MBS and his claim to reforms," he runs a repressive regime that portrays itself as a center of modernity while treating its citizens brutally, just because they demand their rights.

The New York Times said on August 19 that "the West contradicts itself when it repeats what bin Salman claims about women's freedom in Saudi Arabia."

It stressed that it is difficult for bin Salman to discuss women's freedom while his government prosecutes opposition women and men as terrorists and claims to have granted them the right to drive while imprisoning and torturing them because they demanded the right to expression.