Saudi Arabia has implemented an electronic tracking system to monitor women and inform their husbands if they leave the country.

According to an Agence France-Press story, a new system implemented last week sends Saudi husbands text messages from the Saudi immigration agency when their wives are flying out of King Khaled International Airport, near Riyahd. Women are not allowed to leave the country without signed permission from their husbands.

Saudi Arabia, which ranked second worst in a Thomson Reuters global survey on women’s rights in mid 2012,  is a notoriously repressive country. Women are banned from driving, required to have a male guardian, just received the right to vote in municipal elections last year, and must cover most of their bodies, traditionally with a burqa or niqab.

“Women and girls in Saudi Arabia are treated as perpetual minors living under male guardianship all their lives – with restrictions on employment, political participation, travel, education, and healthcare,” Yasmeen Hassan, global director of Equality Now, told Trust.org in response to that survey.

Source: Wikipedia

Saudi woman in niqab

Women being denied the right to leave the country without the permission of their husbands is nothing new, though this tracking technology is. But there are no details in the AFP story or any of the other breaking stories on how exactly the Saudi authorities are doing it.

Based on the limited information available, it may not be a tracking system that uses physical devices such as — and I know this is an awful comparison — a LoJack car-tracking system, which would require a significant infrastructure and ramp-up time for distribution of hardware. It sounds like a simpler system at borders and airports whereby immigration authorities ascertain a woman’s identity, look up her husband in a database, and text him manually or via an automated system.

UPDATE: based on the new local report, this is exactly how the system works.

Which is still, of course, appalling to Western mores and requires a government database that matches up women with male guardians — usually husbands or fathers.

Commentators on Twitter are reacting to the news, some, including Ruwayda Mustafah, a female Kurdish activist/commentator, with despair:

Why can't Saudi Arabia do something for women for once where we can actually be proud of it? Instead of the constant humiliation.

—
Ruwayda Mustafah (@RuwaydaMustafah) November 22, 2012

photo credit: zilverbat. via photopin cc

In November, Twitter acquired Android-security startup Whisper Systems and added its co-founders, Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson, to the Twitter team. With the acquisition, Twitter also gained the code for Whisper System’s products including TextSecure, WhisperCore, WhisperMonitor and Flashback, all applications that are meant to make Android more secure.

Twitter plans to open up all of the code over the next few months, once it confirms that the code meets legal requirements and is viable for the open source community.

The code for TextSecure is available now on Github for anyone to use as they like. Twitter said in its blog post that it hopes people will find the code useful and build upon it. Whisper Systems’ other applications will likely be made open-source in the coming months.

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