The gathering row over leaks detailing the scale of the United States government's capacity for massive data-mining of information linked to public and private online communication has particular resonance for South Africans.
It is clear from the leaks that the National Security Agency (NSA) is not particularly interested in what is happening in our neck of the woods. But the revelations about the Prism programme, which links NSA computers to Google, Facebook and Apple, among others, matter to us regardless.
We use these services and treat them more or less as domestic utilities. But for the purposes of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), we are simply noncitizens, and potentially subject to highly intrusive surveillance without any meaningful oversight. Equally troubling is the extent to which our own government is developing more limited capacity of the same kind at its highly secretive, high-tech National Communication Centre.
The General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill has dropped provisions that specifically allowed warrantless wiretaps of "foreign" signals. That, however, doesn't mean it isn't being done – there is simply no law governing it. In short, our regulatory environment is worse than the surveillance state ushered in by the Patriot Act and Fisa in the US.
And worse, the Protection of State Information Bill would clearly criminalise the publication of leaks like Edward Snowden's about South African cyberspying. In this country, Snowden's equivalent and any news organisation carrying the story would be subject to long jail terms.
The US should not be our standard for intelligence legislation – our Constitution should. The prospect that we are even worse off than American citizens when it comes to the protection of our privacy should chill us all.