In the context of Zakharov and Schrems, the court started articulating some basic principles around bulk surveillance, namely individualised reasonable suspicion, prior authorisation and notification of individuals that have been subjected to surveillance. So, if you have to review the positive developments that have come out of our cases, they have ensured the enforcement of the safeguards. Those are really blockbuster judgments, but there is a question about how do you judge a country like the UK, so it’ll be really interesting to see what the court has to say about the necessity of the safeguards.65
The UK’s experiences with the Investigatory Powers Act bring to the fore the need to take movement-building seriously as part of anti-surveillance work, and the precondition of such work is public awareness-raising. Furthermore, a precondition for public awareness-raising is using empowering concepts that can make a seemingly unassailable problem challengeable. Relying on privacy articulated as a ‘me, me, me’ right is unlikely to provide a compelling enough basis for collective action, and, after all, collective action is what is needed to give campaign positions social force. Powerful social actors, especially those in government, are unlikely to be persuaded to adopt different positions purely on the basis of good arguments; this is especially so if their material interests are threatened by those arguments.
It is clear that the surveillance industry has become extremely powerful, as it provides an alternative outlet for the profits soaked up by the conventional arms industry, which is now in decline. These challenges suggest that a theory of agency in relation to surveillance needs to be developed. It needs to ask and answer the question, What collective behaviour is needed to rein in unaccountable surveillance? In order to reach this point, it is necessary to identify the social forces that are most likely to bring about this change. While the capitalist state incorporated elements of surveillance in earlier periods in history, technological developments have since allowed an unprecedented expansion of the surveillance capacities of the state. Government uses of these capacities have moved far beyond their stated purposes of fighting crime and terrorism. As neoliberalism has intensified inequality, so there has been an increase in the number of the unemployed and those in insecure work, youths (especially urban youths), black people, Muslims, and lesbian, gay and transgender people. In the earlier phase of industrial capitalism, it was fairly easy to identify the social force that had the most to gain and the least to lose from challenging exploitation and oppression, and that therefore constituted the main motor for progressive social change: the organised working class and their allies. The post-industrial era saw new social movement theorists make claims for a broader range of actors as drivers of progressive change, including cross-class identity-based movements. However, while the shift towards more cross-class social movements may have been more apparent in the global North, class-based movements remained active in many parts of the global South, and class never really lost its salience in analyses of social processes.
In conditions of neoliberal precarity, where the industrial working class has declined in power and, with it, their organised formations, it is less easy (but not impossible) to identify the most likely motors of potentially emancipatory social change, including anti-surveillance work. These must surely be the very ‘problem populations’ that are the targets of surveillance, as they have a compelling interest in resisting unaccountable surveillance. With the advent of the 2008 global recession, anti-austerity movements have developed in different parts of the world, and these movements, too, have an immediate interest in anti-surveillance work.
But in order to make the work relevant to these movements, it is necessary to find ways of ‘mainstreaming’ this work in the everyday campaigns that bring ordinary people into organised social and political actions. Of necessity, working-class communities are often highly organised; so, with some creative campaigning, it should not be difficult to relate surveillance and its dangers to mobilisations in defence of public services, for jobs and free education for young people. The important part of campaigning is to take people where the campaign finds them and to relate the work to existing struggles on the ground. In doing so, the role of surveillance in the creation and reproduction of inequality would need to be emphasised, which is what the critical perspective implies. The conflict inherent in social inequality should drive social change, as it is this conflict that is behind the massive expansion of the global security apparatuses, industries and discourses. If resistance to this expansion is going to be effective, it needs to provide a political voice to the otherwise voiceless, and this involves articulating an understanding of privacy that makes most sense to these social groups. This means that privacy as an organising concept is likely to focus less on privacy as an individual right, and more on its content as an enabler of collective rights. So, if privacy is denied these actors, this will prevent collective discussion and organisation.
The forces of reaction are growing stronger by the day in the very countries that lie at the heart of the surveillance industry, and if they are going to be challenged effectively, then anti-surveillance and pro-privacy campaigners clearly need to ‘do’ their work differently. This needs to start with mapping those social forces and their organisations that are making progressive socio-economic and democratic claims, and placing them at the centre of anti-surveillance work. In this regard, there seems to be much to gain from drawing links between social movement studies, political economy and surveillance studies – fields of study that tend to operate in silos. Some possible synergies in this regard will be explored in the next chapter, which focuses on the context of surveillance and social control in South Africa.
The context of surveillance and social control in South Africa
Since the Marikana massacre in 2012 – when scores of mine workers were shot by the police after a protracted strike – several journalists, academics and media commentators have argued that South Africa is reverting to a repressive state. They have interpreted violence at the hands of the police generally, and Marikana specifically, as signs that the post-apartheid social order can no longer be held in check through consent alone. They argue that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and other powerful actors have concluded that naked violence is now needed to stabilise increasingly fractious social relations.1 Some have even used the term ‘police state’ to describe post-Marikana South Africa.2
As a police state is one in which the police act as a political force to contain social dissent using arbitrary force, it is an important manifestation of a more repressive state; another is a society ruled by its military. In the past, the apartheid state used its intelligence services – especially those in the police and military – to identify and target political activists, and this chapter sketches some of this history. How likely is South Africa to descend into a state of full-blown repression, in which intelligence is misused once again to repress dissent violently? How likely is it that there will be more Marikanas? This chapter engages with these broader questions.
THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES IN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
South Africa’s intelligence services date back to its establishment as a Republic in 1961, although the South African police had developed intelligence capabilities before then, under the watchful eye of the UK. The declaration of the armed struggle by the major liberation movements in the wake of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre also added impetus to the apartheid government’s decision, as it felt that this new threat could only be countered effectively through intelligence. The South African Defence Force (SADF) established its own intelligence arm, in the form of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), the year after the declaration of the Republic, but infighting between the police and military agencies led the government to form an entirely separate civilian intelligence agency devoted to national intelligence, Republican Intelligence (RI). This agency was expanded and transformed into the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) in 1969, and its mandate included the collection and analysis of intelligence, although it developed operational elements, too.3
The growth of BOSS fuelled resentment in the