MESSAGE
| DATE | 2014-02-22 |
| FROM | Ruben
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore
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http://www.htxt.co.za/2014/02/11/supporting-day-fight-back/
News & Features
spy museum
Blog ? Opinion
byAdam Oxford
Feb 11
We?re supporting The Day We Fight Back
If you?ve popped by the site this morning (and if you?re reading this,
I?m going to assume you have) you?ll notice that we?ve stuck a great big
banner across the bottom half of your screen. Don?t worry, it?s not
permanent and it is dismissable if you click on the big ?X? in the corner.
The reason it?s there is that we?re happy to be supporting the
international day of protest, The Day We Fight Back
. Which is today, obviously. Along with
some 5,000 or so other sites, including big names like BoingBoing and
reddit , we want tohighlight
the important issues around electronic communications and who?s spying
on who throughout the day.
We?re not alone. Tumblr, the Free Software Foundation, DuckDuckGo,
Greenpeace, the EFF, the Mozilla Foundation, ThoughtWorks and more have
all added their names to the protest, which coincides with the second
anniversary of the successful action against SOPA and PIPI legislation
in the US.
Here at htxt .africa we?re firm believers of the
power of the internet to do good. One of the main reasons we set up this
site is to show off how great technology is, and highlight some of the
incredible things people are doing with it as it becomes more and more
affordable in South Africa. Across the rest of the continent, technology
has the power to alleviate suffering, poverty and political
disenfranchisement. We want to show that just because you love the
serious side of where tech is taking us doesn?t mean you can?t also
enjoy all the cool stuff that comes with it ? the gadgets, the games,
the moon-rocket-in-your-pocket wonder of futuristic calculating machines
we call phones.
But we also believe that all these great things shouldn?t come at the
cost of our right to privacy and with a police state attached. It?s
hard, in a country where the fear of crime is so high, to explain why
it?s not always the best idea to give the police unlimited powers to
access your internet records ? but aside from the principle that an
expectation of privacy underpins freedom, it?s also true that states and
law enforcement agencies abuse powers that citizens grant them.
Take, for example, one of the key discoveries of the Snowden file leaks
from the National Security Agency in the US: the fact that the agency
was monitoring the phone of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel
.
In previous decades, this would have been considered close to an act of
war by a mature sovereign state such as Germany, and certainly not
something you should do to your allies. Yet when we discover that the
UK?s GCHQ spy centre is listening in on South African diplomats
in the same way, at important trade summits where sensitive commercial
information is being discussed, we do nothing.
And that?s just the wrongness of inter-governmental communications. If
diplomats and presidents have no reasonable expectation that they can
send an email to their loved ones without it being intercepted, what
hope for the rest of us?
Part of the problem, here in South Africa, is that we have very little
understanding of exactly what our security services are up to. We know
that they?re ordering spy satellites
,
we know that they?re putting cameras on the highways
.
We know that they insist on us producing ID cards at every given
opportunity and authenticating our name, address and bank records before
we?re allowed to make a phone call. We know that we?re still waiting for
the Protection of Personal Information act (POPI) to enshrine some of
our rights to privacy in law, but we are subject to the Regulation and
Interception of Communications Act
(RICA) which gives (section 7[1]):
Any law enforcement officer may?intercept any communication or may
orally request a telecommunications service provider to route
duplicate signals of indirect communications? to the interception
centre designated within.
The really worrying part of RICA is that law enforcement can do this
with impunity. The same clause explicitly states that providing an
officer is really sure their request is important and urgent, they can
force telecoms companies to hand over information without troubling a
judge for a court order. You know, /really sure/.
The act goes on, requiring ISPs to store traffic, IP allocation and
location data for up to five years (although the ISPs fought back
against this one with some success).
The point, though, is that while The Day We Fight Back is being led
primarily by US organisations, and we know a great deal about what
happens in the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, we don?t really
know much about what happens here. The surveillance infrastructure is
there, but how often is it used, and why? When a minister refuses to
answer questions about an R115 million spy project gone wrong
,
what else are they hiding?
As the EFF?s International Director Danny O?Brien puts it in an
interview we?ll be publishing later today:
A lot of African countries leapfrogged a lot of the world when they
skipped landline communications and went straight to mobile phones,
there?s going to be this same moment again where people will be
getting the majority of their media and internet consumption through
mobile before other countries? We at the EFF are really concerned
about this because the mobile phone internet, intermediated by
mobile phone companies, is a far more invasive and risky place than
the traditional internet? Most mobile phone companies have a very
strong and intimate relationship with the local government. Google
gives less of a hoot about what goes on in the South African
government unless the South African government decides to go through
an Iranian or Chinese path and actually blog Google? I don?t know
the South African telecoms firms by name, but I can guess that one
of them used to be the state-owned telecom provider and the others
have to have a spectrum licence agreement with the government
To answer some of these questions, Vinayak Bhardwaj will be giving a
talk in central Johannesburg tonight
,
along with Quintis Venter of ThoughtWorks and htxt
.africa?s own legal eagle, Paul Jacobson. Full
details are here, hope to see you there.
Throughout today we?ll also be posting more stories related to the
subject of online privacy and how surveillance across Africa affects
journalists, activists and citizens across the continent. Keep checking
back for more.
[Image - Doorway of the International Spy Museum, New York, cc by Tony
Fischer Photography ]
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