There has been little public controversy in South Africa about the implications of other potentially privacy-invasive, data-driven surveillance technologies, such as the use of CCTV in more and more public spaces. The government intends biometrics to become the technology of choice in its transactions with citizens. It is establishing centralised biometric databases for its social security system and identity cards, in spite of major concerns globally about the wisdom of establishing such databases. In 2015, the state entity responsible for airspace safety, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), passed regulations authorising the flying of drones, but the privacy protections contained in its regulations are weak. South Africa is also experimenting with electronic tolling of drivers who use certain freeways, which allows their movements to be tracked for the purposes of billing. However, the relationships (if any) between these various forms of surveillance, and the way they relate to police and intelligence surveillance activities, remain largely unexplored. While South Africa has a data protection law in the form of a Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act, at the time of writing the information and privacy regulator that the Act envisages was still in the process of being set up, which meant that some of the most privacy-invasive technologies were being rolled out in the absence of enforceable privacy protections. In fact, South Africa has been sleepwalking through some of the most significant privacy issues of recent times, ones that have made people elsewhere take to the streets in protest. This book is an attempt to change that situation by linking the current global debates about surveillance and privacy to South Africa, and asking how concerned we should be. Could the widespread abuses of the right to privacy that we have seen in the US, the UK and elsewhere in the North, and as revealed so dramatically by Snowden, take place here too? And if so, what are the implications for the quality of South Africa’s democracy?
OBJECTIVES OF THE BOOK AND THEORETICAL OUTLOOK
In this book, I attempt to answer the following key question: to what extent is South Africa becoming a ‘surveillance society’ governed by a ‘surveillance’ state, in which data-driven surveillance becomes a key instrument of social control? The book is motivated by a growing concern that contemporary societies are starting to experience unacceptably high levels of surveillance, and that South Africa may be no exception to this general rule. But there is little understanding of how surveillance is being practised in South Africa, the extent to which it is being routinised, and the implications of all this. In this book, I seek to establish patterns in the way surveillance is practised in the country, and attempt to explain the phenomenon in the context of the country’s post-apartheid political economy. I will focus particularly on the extent to which political surveillance is being used to stabilise social relations – which have become increasingly fractious since the 2008 global recession – and on the relationship between political surveillance and the economic expansion of the industry. In order to maintain this focus, I do not delve deeply into the social or cultural aspects of data-driven surveillance (or ‘dataveillance’). The commonsense understanding of these issues is that the surveillance state is expanding and that privacy is dead. But the workings of the world of surveillance are not self-evident, which is hardly surprising as so many surveillance practices are still shrouded in secrecy.
I consider the relevance of Snowden’s revelations for South Africa, which does not face any major terrorist threats, and yet inexplicably still engages in mass surveillance. Drawing on a wealth of surveillance studies literature, I look at what is driving the worldwide assault on the right to privacy by state surveillance practices, and how these problems are manifested in South Africa. In exploring these issues, I will focus particularly on those who are most vulnerable to abusive forms of state surveillance because they challenge how power is organised in society, namely political activists, as well as those who write about and defend these change agents, namely academics, journalists and lawyers.
In mapping the growth of ‘surveillance state’ practices in South Africa, I look not only at the globally controversial issues of surveillance of communications, but at more ‘benign’ data-driven tools developed in the North to enable the state to track its subjects, such as bulk personal datasets recording people’s banking transactions, location data and biometrically based identity systems, and the growing use of invasive technologies like CCTV and drones in public spaces. After having mapped the nature and extent of the problem, I seek to answer the following questions: What concepts are needed to mount successful resistance to these practices? What resistance practices have succeeded or are likely to succeed, what social forces and actors are most likely to mount successful resistance, and under what conditions are they most likely to succeed? To what extent are companies pushing back against state surveillance, or are they complicit in the problem? What kind of society do we want to live in? Should this be a society where every movement is tracked, and where there is no such thing as private space anymore?
A key challenge to mounting successful resistance to surveillance is that so much of it is mobile and invisible; people may not even be aware that their movements are being tracked through their cellphones, for instance. In exploring these questions, I seek to contribute to a growing body of literature on privacy, surveillance and resistance, but from a Southern perspective and with a particular bias towards working-class political and social movements as actors. So much of the literature on these questions focuses on the global North and the middle-class NGO activists who campaign against unaccountable surveillance. These questions are important because – in spite of significant gains – the public outrage in the wake of the Snowden revelations has not translated into game-changing collective action against mass surveillance, and this has exposed some of the limits of NGO-led privacy advocacy. South Africans are likely to become much more sensitive to privacy issues as the country’s information or privacy regulator is being established. A comprehensive analysis of how worried we should be about these problems should hopefully set an agenda for this regulator in the years to come. While this book uses developments in the global North as a touchstone – which is necessary given that the Snowden revelations were largely about surveillance abuses in the North – it is focused on South Africa, and should therefore be considered a single case study of surveillance in South Africa, rather than a comparative study of several countries.
My outlook is critical in nature, and I embrace a critical political economy approach to explore the above-mentioned questions. Political economy focuses on the structures of control in capitalist society and the production of wealth needed to reproduce that society.39 In relation to communication studies, political economy examines power relations in the functioning of communications systems and embeds this analysis in the social context in which communications take place.40 Political economy can provide the conceptual tools to examine the relationship, if any, between political, economic and communications power and to analyse the impact of commodification of communications on the ability of people to receive and impart information. Furthermore, political economy’s