‘The privacy you’re concerned about is largely an illusion. All you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy.”
That wasn’t Vodacom boss Alan Knott-Craig comforting his customers about the new kit he will shortly be installing on his network to help government snoops listen in on cellphone calls. Nor was it Phuthuma Nhleko of MTN explaining how his company will store records of SMS traffic in anticipation of requests to provide it to the police.
It wasn’t even intelligence czar Barry Gilder, whose down-home style promotes a sense of near-tranquillity about such things, protesting that the sophisticated data interception tools given to authorities by the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Amendment Bill are no cause for concern.
It was Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, explaining in September 2001 why concerns about civil liberties should be no obstacle to his proposal that all Americans be required to carry ID cards.
Oracle, of course, builds the powerful database software that makes it possible for credit card companies to profile you down to your choice of underwear. By coincidence, Ellison recently offered to provide the US government — no stranger to large-scale surveillance of its citizens of late — with the technological tools to manage an ID card system and track citizen behaviour for free. (And when did you last hear of Pretoria passing up a chance to absorb ”global best practice”?)
Ellison did not go quite so far as to suggest that privacy is a bourgeois conceit held over from the 20th century that simply cannot survive in the Surveillance Society of the 21st, but he might have if he was inclined to sociology, rather than yacht racing.
Scott McNeally was thinking along similar lines when he dismissed the idea that a new kind of freedom was to be found in the anonymity of the Internet.
”You have no privacy,” he famously said. ”Get over it.”
McNeally should know. He builds the Sun computers that run the massive databases etching your passage through the supermarket, hospital or border post in bright digital permanence.
Like these Silicon Valley titans, although for different reasons, it would seem that most South Africans aren’t too bothered about privacy. Perhaps it has something to do with growing up in a police state, but we seem to expect and accept surveillance. Security cameras blanketing our cities? We would like some more of them, please. And Hanis, the giant software system that a succession of home affairs directors general have attempted to pilot to completion? Most people don’t even know it exists, let alone what power it puts in the hands of the state.
Indeed, very few people seem to have asked whether home affairs consistently fails at service delivery because its leadership is dominated by people from the ”intelligence community” who are more interested in gathering information than in making the system work for citizens.
The minister, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, has an African National Congress intelligence background, Gilder has moved back and forth between intelligence jobs and the department with no apparent difficulty, and before him there was Billy Masetlha.
So it not surprising that the only real fuss about the Bill is who is going to pay for it.
Not surprising perhaps, but worrying. Among its provisions, the Bill will require network operators to install mechanisms for spies and police investigators, armed with permission from a judge, to tap straight into cellphone lines and e-mail accounts. The need for permission from a judge is supposed to prevent the privacy of law-abiding citizens from being invaded.
Don’t believe it.
To be sure, Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils is saying soothing things about checks and balances, but no one has been arrested for the surveillance of politicians, journalists and business people conducted by Masetlha and Co in an apparent attempt to advance Jacob Zuma’s cause. And private investigators, with their deep links to the police and military, are already able to gain access to an extraordinary range of information from banks and telephone companies.
Yet Parliament is being asked to make surveillance dramatically easier. MPs should ask to be convinced that the existing safeguards work before they do anything of the sort. Perhaps they should refer to that other 20th-century relic — the Constitution, in particular the Bill of Rights — which states ”Everyone has the right to privacy, which includes the right not to have … the privacy of their communications infringed.”
Nic Dawes is associate deputy editor