although the presence of terrorists in the country has been an enduring source of speculation. So, it could be assumed that the region should have little reason to invest in the building of surveillance states. Evidence is emerging that suggests this assumption is incorrect.
Even though South Africa is not a terrorist target, growing social discord over inequality means that the temptation is there for less principled members of the security apparatus to abuse the state’s surveillance capabilities to advantage the ruling group in the ruling party and disadvantage their perceived detractors. This possibility is not far-fetched. In 2005, the state’s mass surveillance capacities were misused to spy on perceived opponents of Jacob Zuma, then contender for the presidency. Journalists have also had their communications intercepted, and several politicians and activists have alleged that their communications were intercepted. The Mail & Guardian has quoted sources inside the police and the SSA alleging that security personnel often do not even bother to obtain directions to intercept communications.35 In 2013, it emerged during a trial that the Crime Intelligence Division of the South African Police Service (SAPS) had placed members of the extreme Afrikaner militia, the Boeremag, under surveillance while in prison, which included intercepting communications between the accused and their lawyers, in violation of attorney–client privilege.36 While it is extremely difficult to establish the extent of the problem, these incidents make the case for reforms to ensure that the state’s surveillance capacities are not abused.
South Africa has a law, RICA, that governs lawful interceptions for policing and national security purposes. In spite of the fact that its drafters attempted to strike a balance between the interests of justice and national security, on the one hand, and civil liberties such as privacy, on the other, it ignores many of the most basic international human rights protections. Even worse, the available evidence points to mass surveillance being grossly under-regulated in South Africa, and, as Snowden has shown, where there is a lack of accountability, abuses are almost inevitable. The centre that undertakes this form of surveillance is the National Communications Centre (NCC); the centre has no founding statute and its interceptions do not require a warrant. In fact, the available evidence points to its operating on an entirely separate but parallel track to the targeted, lawful interception process of RICA. In 2005, abuses of the NCC’s surveillance capacities were confirmed by the statutory intelligence watchdog, the Inspector General of Intelligence, who found that the country’s bulk scanning facilities had been used to keep South Africans under surveillance during the country’s bruising presidential succession battle, including senior members of the ruling party, the opposition, businessmen and officials in the public service.37 So, the organ of state that has the greatest capacity to conduct mass surveillance is also the one that is least regulated by law. This capacity is so intrusive that its use should be authorised by primary legislation. WikiLeaks has also revealed how South Africa manufactures and exports mass surveillance equipment to authoritarian regimes such as Libya. Privacy International has also publicised the fact that the South African government has provided funding to the local technology company Vastech for the manufacture of one of its surveillance products, and that the problem of taxpayers’ money being used to fund mass surveillance equipment which was exported to a repressive regime has not been addressed.38
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
