In 2013, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret documents revealing that various state spy agencies, notably the NSA and the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and other allied intelligence agencies, had spied on the communications of millions of innocent citizens. Many were outraged that their privacy was being violated, and rightly so. They objected to the fact that these governments had used the war against terror – launched in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States and the 2005 attack on London – as a pretext to expand state surveillance capacities far beyond what was actually needed to fight this war. The spy agencies scooped up the communications of millions of people into their dragnet, including those of lawyers, journalists and academics, who are under professional obligations to protect their sources of information. But the Snowden revelations revealed only the tip of the surveillance iceberg; apart from insisting on their right to tap into communications, more and more governments introduced surveillance technologies to track people’s movements and transactions with public and private institutions (such as banks). As a result, the state is becoming like a one-way mirror, where it can see more and more of what its citizens do and say, while citizens see less and less of what the state does, owing to high levels of secrecy around surveillance.
In this book, I assess the relevance of Snowden’s revelations for South Africa, and in doing so, I ask to what extent South Africa is becoming a surveillance society governed by a surveillance state. How concerned should we be about the ever-expanding surveillance capacities of the state, and the uses to which they are being put? Are they being used for the democratic purpose of making people safer, or for the repressive purpose of social control, to pacify citizens and to target those considered to be politically threatening to ruling interests? What forms of collective action are needed to ensure that unaccountable surveillance does not take place, as the secretive nature of these activities makes them very difficult to organise around. What works and what doesn’t when it comes to developing organised responses? These questions should concern all those who care about our democracy, and we have a democratic responsibility to demand the information necessary to answer them properly.
I started engaging with issues relating to surveillance in the early 2000s, when I directed a non-governmental organisation (NGO) called the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI). At the time, 9/11 had just taken place, and the world (including South Africa) was considering what contributions should be made to fight the war against terror. While South Africa has not been a terrorist target, it faced its own internal challenges, too, including a massive crime wave that threatened social stability. These factors led to its reviewing its communications surveillance capacities, and resulted in the passing of the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act (RICA). A few years later, evidence emerged of these capacities being abused to spy on politicians, business people and journalists, in the context of a bruising succession battle for the presidency. Also, a new wave of social movements against various aspects of neoliberal service delivery was formed, and evidence emerged of their being placed under surveillance, too. I documented some of these incidents in a 2014 book called The Rise of the Securocrats: The Case of South Africa. Through my involvement in the FXI, it became apparent to me that all was not well with our spy agencies. More recently, my involvement in the Right2Know Campaign (R2K) has taught me that these unhealthy practices continue. Consequently, when the Snowden documents were released, and South African journalists and ordinary residents began asking what the implications were for our own society, I became interested in developing researched responses to these questions.
In writing this book, I drew on research funded by the Open Society Foundation for South Africa (OSF-SA) into communications surveillance policies and practices in South Africa. The research was commissioned by the Media Policy and Democracy Project (MPDP), a joint project of the Department of Journalism, Film and Television of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) – where I am based – and the Department of Communication Science at the University of South Africa. The MPDP promotes participatory, public interest media and communications policy-making, and to that end has collaborated with a range of organisations in South Africa to ensure a more bottom-up approach to policy-making. I conceptualised and managed the research for the MPDP. The overall purpose of the research was to assess the extent to which South Africa measures up to international human rights principles when it comes to communications surveillance. The research methodology was qualitative in nature, and consisted of policy and legislative analysis and interviews with constituencies that are particularly vulnerable to surveillance by virtue of the fact that they handle sensitive information – namely, lawyers, journalists, academics, political and social activists, and trade unionists – to assess to what extent they are adapting to and resisting surveillance or the threat of surveillance. Admire Mare undertook the analysis and interviews, and I have incorporated some of the key findings into this book.
The research also included investigative journalism into surveillance practices in South Africa. Journalist Heidi Swart undertook this work, and she produced a technical report on actual communications practices, as well as a range of newspaper articles on the technical capacities of those undertaking surveillance, the uses to which these capacities are being put and what needs to change about surveillance practices. These stories were published in the Mail & Guardian newspaper and the Daily Maverick online news site. I draw on Swart’s pathbreaking journalism for the book.
It could be argued that surveillance in South Africa is too secretive a topic on which to write a book, but this is not so. By combining this research with information available in the public domain, including leaked documents about the operations of the various branches of South Africa’s civilian intelligence service, the State Security Agency (SSA), and South African surveillance companies, available through WikiLeaks, the global news network Al Jazeera and the Snowden documents, as well as industry information collected by the London-based international non-governmental organisation Privacy International, it is very possible to build up a picture of surveillance practices in South Africa and to subject them to a ‘health check’. I have also drawn on a series of articles I have written on these questions for local publications, notably the Mail & Guardian, Daily Maverick and the Sunday Times, some of which have been republished on the UK-based site openDemocracy.
I have also incorporated into the manuscript my inaugural professorial lecture, which dealt with the question whether South Africa