It is like something Lewis Carroll might have written: “Beware the fearsome information peddler; he lurks, waiting to catch the unsuspecting Democratee …”
The Browse Mole saga, and Parliament’s role in it, is a work of similarly unrestrained imagination. What are we to make of all this?
Beyond the obvious desire to get rid of the Scorpions lies a deeper malaise.
The hysteria about the information peddlers — and about the Directorate of Special Operations’s activities — betrays a wider obsession about controlling the flow of strategic information, of private intelligence. And that’s bad news for us as a democracy.
If knowledge is power, and in the modern world that is increasingly true, the South African state wants to monopolise access to strategic knowledge, or at least control it.
We see this in the castigation of news media for relying on “leaks” rather than officially sanctioned information.
We see it in the awful way whistleblowers are treated by the authorities.
We see it in the bid to rein in the private gathering of intelligence, which has long been a bug-bear of this government.
In 2003, Lindiwe Sisulu, then minister of intelligence, told Parliament: “We are particularly concerned about the proliferation of private intelligence companies …”
“Intelligence,” she went on to say, “is a secret state activity to understand any threat to national security and thereafter to advise policy-makers on steps to counteract such threat.
“It is an activity performed by officers of the state for state purposes. Secret collection, the use of information that is not publicly available, are the constitutive elements that would distinguish this from other intellectual activity.
“Therefore it should be clear to all that there is no scope here for private intelligence activity for purposes of gain or profit. We are moving swiftly to outlaw any vestiges of such activity.”
If the whole Moe Shaik vs Bulelani Ngcuka, Billy Masetlha vs Ronnie Kasrils, Jacob Zuma vs Thabo Mbeki debacle has taught us anything, it is that the formal safeguards against the abuse of state security services are worthless.
In that case, the more the power of strategic knowledge is dispersed beyond the sole clutches of the state, the better.
That is especially so because private intelligence much more easily leaks into public knowledge — via the boardrooms of those companies that pay for it and via the media.
Indeed, objectively looked at, what an effective media does, particularly in the realm of investigative journalism, could quite easily be characterised as intelligence gathering.
We probably already sometimes fall foul of the Private Security Industry Regulation Act, which compels the registration as a “private investigator” of anyone who, “in a private capacity and for the benefit of another person, investigates the identity, actions, character, background or property of another person, without the consent of such a person”.
The moves the minister was talking about comprise the new Protection of Information Bill, which is due to go before the Cabinet this month.
The new law has been kept tightly under wraps. It is an update of an Orwellian apartheid statute, but the indications are that it may be just as dangerous to the flow of information in the public interest.
The very basis of democracy is accurate information about what government and other powerful institutions are up to. This kind of “intelligence gathering” is every citizen’s right, and every news medium’s duty.