The most irresponsible article opinion piece I’ve ever seen, by far was on Ammon today, entitled ”The Cost of 15 mins in the bathroom”, poking fun at the government’s restriction of general internet access to increase productivity. The article goes as follows:

By government calculations, the cost of each employee spending 15 minutes in the bathroom would reach JD 17.5 million per year.

The idea, of course, alluding to the government’s calculations of 1 hour spent by government employees browsing the Internet costs the government JD 70 million per year, leading Prime Minister Samir Rifai’s government to block access to over 48 websites from the internal network at all ministries and public agencies.

Jordan’s ICT Ministry published the text of the latest Cyberspace Crime Law recently, introducing some regulation, but also protection and possible restrictions to the largely unregulated IT sector in Jordan. The law is a major step forward for privacy and security, creating punishments for unauthorized access of all types, as well as unauthorized modification of data, etc. But the text of the law at certain articles is vague, providing multiple possibilities of interpretation and thus some concerns.

Note that I translated all relevant snippets from Arabic to English myself, and I am by no means qualified to give a proper legal translation or correct legal terminology. It is only done for the sole purpose of giving context to non-Arabic readers and not to be taken seriously as correct technical interpretations.

Prelude

I have been thinking about this one for a while. You see, I am very interested in regional politics (“region” here comes from the Latin ”to Middle East”…), and I like to read about it in as many places I could, including blog posts of course, and I often comment when I feel compelled to share or add.

This took a good portion of my energy for the past month, and discusses the history of political development, and its lack thereof, in Jordan. It is rather long, but nevertheless, if you have a comment or something to say, then at least more than the abstract.

Abstract