A Saudi app that lets ordinary people “play the role of a police officer” may have alerted authorities to the tweets of a student whose sentencing to 34 years in jail has drawn international condemnation.
Just weeks after the verdict against Salma al-Shehab – a doctoral candidate at Britain’s Leeds University – rights groups say another woman was given a 45-year sentence for her social media posts – highlighting a crackdown targeting women online.
Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani was convicted of “using the internet to tear the (Saudi) social fabric”, according to DAWN, a Washington-based human rights group.
While it is not clear how Qahtani’s posts were detected, rights groups think Shehab was reported by citizens using Kollona Amn, a government app that lets citizens alert authorities to everyday incidents like road accidents or suspicious behaviour.
“I went into your account, and I found it to be pitiful and full of trash, I took several pictures and I sent them to Kollona Amn,” one user posted below a comment by Shehab, a screenshot reviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation showed.
Kollona Amn, meaning “we are all security” in Arabic, has been downloaded more than a million times from the Google Play store.
Despite billing itself as a utility app to speed up “rescue missions”, rights campaigners say it…
