Towards a South African Internet Bill of Rights
Back in 1996 the WWW was in its infancy and South Africa’s constitutional assembly was putting the final touches to a document which would become our Bill of Rights. I wrote a letter to Wired Magazine about the inclusion of a home-grown right which had heretofore been excluded from the lexicon of government and especially the previous apartheid regime.
The Right to Privacy (article 14), and more specifically the right of citizens not to have the privacy of their communications infringed, was written during a period in which cryptofreaks and cyberanarchists were under threat from various quarters. The US government had only a year previously attempted to clamp down on PGP encryption technology, while South African anti-apartheid activists had been caught by the Bureau for State Security (BOSS) using IBM technology. The very real possibility of an Orwellian world in which privacy was practically impossible because of the new technologies then emerging, scared us enough to want to secure privacy as well as communications freedom.
In addition to privacy, our progressive constitution lists under Freedom of Expression (article 16), the “freedom to receive or impart information or ideas” and the terms used specifically exclude the kind of bureaucratic doublespeak which often seems to place the binary world of noughts and ones beyond the scope of liberty and freedom. Our constitution is very much a pro-Internet and information-friendly document.
It is therefore extremely disconcerting to see attempts by the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, Malusi Gigaba to limit Internet freedom under the guise of an anti-pornography campaign. Not only has Gigaba expressed his desire to build a “national firewall” like the one surrounding mainland China, that would essentially filter out content the government deems to be a threat to national security, but he appears to believe that service providers will willingly allow themselves to be implicated in the erosion of civil liberties guaranteed by our constitution.
If one follows the Ministers obsequious reasoning, not only will first tier providers pay for the new firewall, but consumers will have the Department of Home Affairs to thank for providing content. If the proposed legislation is adopted, every single website will end up under the purview of the Publications Control Board and the concept of Net Neutrality will be abolished in the national interest.
How is it possible that we have come to the Orwellian future in which the right to receive and impart ideas, the privacy of our communications is infringed to the point where Google searches, Yahoo mail, Facebook and Flikr are all subject to the dictates of the Minister of Home Affairs?
Shortly after 911, under pressure from the Bush administration our government passed a series of bills aimed at clamping down on global terrorism. The Anti-Terrorism Bill (ATB) became known as the The Protection of Constitutional Democracy against Terrorist and Related Activities Act (Democracy Act). Fortunately South Africa did not end up with a Patriot Act, but it proceeded to adopt off-the-shelf US legislation which had once been shot down by the democrats under Clinton, only to be adopted under George W Bush. Despite criticism the new bills passed without substantial debate and opposition from political parties in Parliament.
FICA and RICA are bizarre acronyms that you will find in postings about the infamous Clipper Chip and anti-PGP technology on mailing lists doing the rounds BEFORE South Africa’s Bill of Rights was even adopted. Not only do we get fingerprinted by Home Affairs (a rights violation if ever there was one) but we now get FICA’d and RICA’d — retinal scans and chip implants are surely not far behind?
While we all know that FICA gives our government the right to delve into our bank accounts, do you realise that RICA (Regulation of Interception of Communications Act) forces mobile telephone companies to install technology that allows our government to record wireless conversation and capture SMS traffic without judicial oversight? That’s right, Clipper Chip technology has already been implemented in our telephone system thanks to people like Malusi Gigaba.
Now the Department of Home Affairs is in the process of drawing up a RICA FOR THE INTERNET. The deputy minister has essentially expressed the desire to censor content while placing back-doors and clipper chips in every computer using broadband technology. In essence the government wants a backdoor into your social life and desktop – the right to spy and censor your communications without having to bother with the rigmarole of court orders and judicial oversight.
PGP and GPG are the de facto standards of encryption technologies today. You see this type of technology in action every time you get a VeriSign SSL or TLS web page. Programmers use it to authenticate software and people use it to sign documents. Personal Encryption i.e privacy is something we all take for granted but seldom use, lulled into the complacency of ubiquitous and freely available content. It may soon become the only way to experience freedom in cyberspace.
Unless we secure our rights with new laws that give affect to our Constitution — creating a Bill of Rights for the Internet which also recognises the rights of the individual qua machines, and which includes Net Neutrality and other core ideas such as the right to share content via fair use and copyleft, we will be forced to encrypt everything. Our web pages will be slowly served up as encoded noughts and ones as Malusi Gigaba merely succeeds in retarding development and disabling the kind of fast, open social intercourse that yes, delivers pornography as much as it delivers new ideas like Ubuntu to the rest of the world.
NOTE: The Protection of Information Bill is currently under consideration in the South African Parliament, the ISS and Open Society Justice Initiative are hosting a public seminar to exchange ideas about the protection of information within a democratic dispensation
Is political language behind the latest Xenophobic attacks?
THERE are number of theories doing the rounds as to why the latest round of xenophobic attacks, despite the success of the World Cup, seem a strong eventuality. As I write this, there are renewed reports of violence, looting and fear amongst South Africa’s immigrant community who have borne the brunt of hatred from our nations’ citizens. A recurrence on the scale of 2008 may be unlikely but the stain of the well-planned pogroms against foreigners two years ago remains and has driven perceptions of what is to follow.
For starters we have the failure of the ANC Youth League to issue an apology for its outrageous use of the slogan: “Kill the Boer.”
“Kill the Boer” has quickly turned into “Kill the foreigner” and it is the ANC which needs to account for the attacks of 2008 — the result of the much vaunted Mugabeite “war against the white man” outlined by Julius Malema and his stormtroopers, which merely backfired into the all too familiar black-on-black violence which characterized the late eighties.
The violent political language and angry rhetoric which has entered much of the political debate in government circles over the past decade also needs to be resoundingly condemned, not merely for furthering the ambitions of race chauvinists and black supremacists in government circles, but also for instigating crimes against humanity. The 2008 genocide against Somali’s and Malawian immigrants was clearly such a crime, as too the current spectacle of criminality unleashed by thugs amongst the ANCYL
A photograph of yesterday’s murder of a Malawian in the Western Cape speaks louder than words.
It is not enough to simply decode South Africa’s peculiar internecine strife within the vocabulary of township struggle. Ask any South African what is going on with the Amakwerekwere in the township and you get the stock character assassination and blood libel. Either “they are too black” or “they don’t speak our language” as hatred against white immigration turns into hatred against black immigration. In a sense we have all been turned into emigres of a foreign land, with the South African government’s steadfast refusal to accept immigration on any term other than its foreignness. (See this posting)
The pogroms are thus not simply the result of economic jealousy by the vast mass of unemployed youth in the townships, even though our immigrants tend to do better than our locals, working harder, and longer for less. They speak of a basic fact of human nature — fear of the other, ignorance of each others culture.
The xenophobic attacks against all that which is “alien”, “foreign” or “unknown have surely created a deep wound which clearly the World Cup has not managed to heal. It is not enough to simply wave the national flag, sing the national anthem, blow a Vuvuzela and claim football unites.
Even though South Africans have embraced the essence of multicultural cosmopolitanism by supporting the footballers of Ghana, and Spain, we need concrete steps, not symbolic gestures. A common language, civics classes for new immigrants, literacy and education for all, if we are to survive to avoid another genocide.
Communication on the street is already difficult as it is — having a huge influx of newcomers from up North who don’t speak a word of English or any one of the 11 official languages makes it far worse. It is bad enough that we already have too many official languages, (12 if you count language for the deaf). When immigrants speak none of the above, and when there are too many dialects floating around to create a lingua franco without some form of divine intervention, there is trouble.
It is not another trite theory to suggest that when hordes of newcomers who don’t speak any Nguni language arrive on our shores — some 15 000 each month in the Western Cape alone — our primal and primitive instincts reign supreme. Try having an argument with a shop-owner who only speaks Arabic, as many Somalis do, or try entering into cultural discourse with a Congolese whose closest language may only be French?
Civics classes and language laws that ensure that immigrants learn the rudiments of what it means to be South African could change all of this.
Knowledge of our history, culture and traditions should be a requisite for gaining the vote, as too basic insights into our Bill of Rights. Waving a flag, blowing a Vuvuzela and carting the president aloft over one of the national Stadiums is clearly not enough
UPDATE: Statement by Zackie Achmat
SA media corruption under the spotlight
THE Ashley Smith saga is just the tip of the iceberg. What with an Independent News Media director being rapped over the knuckles by the Canadian legislature for bribery and corruption (should former politicians be allowed to own a stake in the media?) and former apartheid cronies acting with impunity despite being on the payroll of the past government and the Naspers Group, one would think television news media would be having a field day. Unfortunately this story does not appear to be getting much coverage despite the consequences.
Government hawks and spooks smell blood and are moving in to restrain South Africa’s corrupt print media. Let’s face it, if we can’t trust Newspaper Hse to look after its own, then who can we trust? Well, how about the increasingly vociferous and loud fourth media? Yes, that ‘s right, us bloggers. The Internet is the reason why any of this information is getting exposed in the first place. Government should therefore be thanking us for a job well done. As for the proposed launch of an ANC daily, I smell another Information Scandal. If you were old enough to remember the era when B J Vorster tried to buy the Washington Star then you probably also remember Muldergate and the battle to free the press from government subservience. South Africa needs a broader more inclusive media, not self-serving bureaucrats posing as journalists.
ANC using Rasool issue to ‘justify media tribunal’
ANTON HARBER: It’s up to the ANC and the media to stop the rot
Editors demand zero tolerance on corruption among SA journalists
Mainstream media, your time to come clean is NOW!
As if cynical government intervention in the media were not bad enough, now we have the scandal involving payments made to a certain journalist at the Independent Group.
Does it surprise anybody that Ashley Smith may have been receiving brown paper envelopes stuffed with money from the office of the last Premier of the Western Cape? Not really, since most media executives in South Africa are already in the pocket of one political party or two. When you have Maria Ramos on the board of the holding company of the largest media conglomerate in Africa we should all be worried. The wife of Trevor Manual looks set to become the Imelda Marcos of South Africa — remember the scandal about a certain Philippino woman’s shoe collection?
But if the fraud saga involving Naspers is nothing to write home about, is Independent the clean company it purports to be? Remember Mac Maharaj, our disgraced ex-Minister of Transport? Whatever happened to him? Well if you read annual reports you might be a little shocked to find out he still heads a new consortium set up on the remains of Clear Channel Independent, that’s right, the division which almost got sold by INM heavyweight Denis O’Brien in a cost-cutting initiative that would have saved the company from the hands of international bankers and dirty finance.
So now we have two media companies in the country, both firmly in the grips of the World Bank. Wonderful. I can hear everybody congratulating everybody else while editors have their tasks cut out trying to write copy that doesn’t have the stench of the junk bond market about it. Did I forget to mention Maria Ramos connection to a certain bank which almost folded because of sovereign debt?
So let’s see, the Cape Times gets all upset about Ashley Smith and a couple of Rands, but one of their directors gets given money in a very large brown envelope from a German arm’s dealer nogal. The man is captured on camera with Karlheinz Shrieber and nobody this side of the Atlantic bat’s an eyelid?
“Canadians are entitled to expect from those who govern, particularly the holders of high office, exemplary conduct in their professional and personal lives. Further, those who are making the transition from public life to private life must live up to the standards of conduct expected of them in order to preserve the integrity of government.”
Justice Oliphant said the former prime minister was guilty of inappropriate activity in at least two areas.
“I found that the business and financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney were inappropriate. I also found that Mr. Mulroney’s failure to disclose those business and financial dealings was inappropriate,”
Has anybody taken a corruption reading in the local press? Was Ashley Smith’s activities as a journalist appropriate, or is the issue rather one of governance? Should our government have journalists on its payroll? In fact should the press be our government? What happens when we start to blur the lines?
If you are worried about George Orwell’s predictions of a one world shadow government or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, then put this in your blackberry:
Naspers is about to lose its stake in Tencent Holdings despite posting a profit this year. Think it impossible? Think again.
Because of ongoing racism at the company, Naspers is about to have its stake in Tencent Holdings cut. Asians do not enjoy racism and Chinese regulation is about to trim the Naspers holding, which contributes 40% of the companies earnings.
“China giveth and China taketh away” says Moneyweb. “When Naspers (JSE:NPN) entered the Chinese market in 2001, many outlined the infinite opportunities that await, however with the opportunities comes the threat of increased regulation.”
“Naspers shareholding in Hong Kong based Tencent might have to be reduced, this after sweeping new regulations to the online payment industry could force leading Chinese online companies to restructure their shareholdings. According to an FT report, Beijing said “it would place restrictions on payment providers with foreign investors”.”
Blink, and its gone. And that goes for the last remaining liberals at Independent.
Paris Hilton saga – time to legalise alcohol alternative
Pot Princess
THE arrest of a Paris Hilton over the weekend for alleged possession of dagga, has focused world attention on South Africa’s outdated and petty anti-marijuana laws. For starters, the crime is a misdemeanor, the result of the ruling parties inability to deal with calls to end drug prohibition and the legacy of apartheid. It is also a failure of successive ANC administrations to implement the cognitive rights and liberties guaranteed by our constitution.
Consumption of dagga, zol, boom, mary jane, weed was always a factor at Mass Democratic Movement rallies. The intoxicating fumes of cannabis infused meetings held by the United Democratic Front and End Conscription Campaign. It was the staple ice-breaker when alcohol was difficult to come by and informed the lives of so many struggle activists, from Trevor Manual to Walter Sisulu himself.
Veteran journalist Dennis Becket recently confessed to smoking the herb, while the province of Mpumalanga gave a presentation on the benefits which might be gained from creating an industry based upon cannabis and hemp production.
The policy of the present government has been hypocritical at best. While officially South Africa supports prohibition, there is a mixed message which goes out to its citizens. Foreigners like Jennifer Rovero who on Saturday admitted the dagga cigarette being smoked by Paris Hilton belonged to her, are treated with disdain. Rovera was slapped with a R1000 fine or 30 days in jail and faces deportation.
In 1994 the ANC was elected on a broad social platform that included reform of the country’s repressive drug legislation. Within the space of a few short years, issues such as legalisation and decriminalisation were swept away under pressure from the World Bank and the USA which attached drug prohibition requirements to financial loans and market guarantees..The public debate on ending prohibition, such as instituting harm reduction strategies and taxation ended with securocrats at the United Nations.
Yet South Africa stands alongside the Czech Republic, Mexico, Portugal and Spain as a place where the law tends to favour tolerance of small amounts of what is essentially a natural substance, a plant if you will. Surely now is the time to gain clarity on whether our nations policies are one of decriminalization or legalisation? Should dagga be decriminalised for medical purposes? What about the vast body of evidence which suggests the plant assists in the relief of pain and can even cure cancer?
A proposal to put the legalization of marijuana in California to a vote this November for instance is causing some growers of the plant in the state to worry about a sharp drop in the value of their crop if the measure succeeds..
If it is okay for Paris Hilton to toke on a joint, but not okay for Rovera to flash a cannabis cigarette around in Port Elizabeth, where is the justice system and our shared values? Surely Rovera was merely sampling the local brew and partaking in a South African tradition which is at least 20 000 years old. The Khoisan word for marijuana, “dagga” and our idiosyncratic use of the term, is not just another example of linguistic differences down South, but a word which reveals something special and innate about ourselves.
Shame on you Media24 — SA needs a change of government.
South Africa needs a change of government. After 15 years of ANC rule it is time for the party to join the ranks of the opposition.
Is it because the ANC no longer represents the genuine aspirations of the people of South Africa, the majority of whom believe in human rights, freedom and equality for all? Is it because the ANC youth league is headed by a black supremacist and race chauvinist, while the Zuma administration continues to espouse the politics of race-hatred via race-based capitalism — an ideological framework which has begun to resemble the dirty tricks of the apartheid-era National Party government. Our government is nothing less than a corrupt political force which serves no other purpose than to line the pockets of a small power elite via the hypocritical deployment of “Socialism for the Few” before the brainwashed masses while hanging on to the racial categories defined by the apartheid regime.
Strip away the Orwellian double-speak of doing one thing and saying another, and the only language spoken by the ANC is the language of power and corruption. You can see it in the smoke and mirrors charade of Polakwane. The constant weaving this way and that on a variety of issues, with a final resort to tribalism and ethnicity in order to garner votes while covering up the truth of the many deals which go far beyond negotiated compromises to seriously jeopardizing the right of any ANC member to rule this country within the bounds of law. The contradictions within the party are now so apparent that anybody who considers themselves a member does so only because they have given up the idea of social justice and have embraced the contradictions.
Take the fact that both Maria Ramos and ex-Minister Valli Moosa (now head of the neo-conservative World Conservation Union) sit on the same board of directors as apartheid supremo Boetie Van Zyl — Sanlam is the de facto holding company of Naspers/Media24, — or that the final report of the TRC has been resoundingly trashed by senior counsel acting on their behalf?
Five months ago I appeared in the Labour Court of Cape Town, facing a barrage of attacks from lawyers appearing on behalf of Media24.
The attacks were informed by apartheid and raised the spectre of South Africa’s racial classification system. Not only has the corporation insisted that I belong to a particular racial category but Media24 continues to maintain that legal consequences should be attached to issues of race and that my own characterization of my skin colour as “coloured” is both “wrong” and “ridiculous”. Read the rest of this entry »
Shembe deal on Vuvuzela rights.
DURBAN, South Africa — AFP reports a South African church has reached a deal with a vuvuzela maker acknowledging that their prophet in 1910 invented the horn that has become the sound of the World Cup, a spokesman said Tuesday.
The Nazareth Baptist Church says its founder Isaiah Shembe invented the monotone instrument a century ago using antelope horns, which his followers used in prayers.
The church had threatened a lawsuit to assert their intellectual property rights over the vuvuzela, which is now mass-produced in plastic and has become the must-have accessory at World Cup matches.
“We are now considered as the official makers of the vuvuzela. We are going to work together,” said the church’s spokesman Enoch Mthembu.
In the 1980s, supporters of Durban’s AmaZulu football club began blowing horns made out of antelope horns or stalks of sugar cane in stadiums.
The tradition was adopted by the Kaizer Chiefs in Soweto, who popularised the instrument around Johannesburg.
Masincedane Sport Company decided to mass produce the horns in plastic in 2001.
The company said it would release details of the deal later this week.
The Nazareth Baptist Churchalso known as the Shembe after its founder, and which claims four million followers and mixes Christianity and Zulu traditions.
Shembe is revered as an African Messiah.
Mthembu said the church wanted to prevent copycat versions of vuvuzelas coming from China.
“Today, our main concern is to close down illegal manufacturers and the Chinese companies which produce very cheap items,” he said.
“It is important for us to be recognised as the inventor of the vuvuzela. It is a South African instrument and the production is out of control now.”
Cut of the dress too much for FIFA
Dress too short, woman arrested
CONFLICTING statements from FIFA around the Bavaria Beer dress controversy could be a case of sour grapes or stail hops. It appears, the federation have sold the rights to advertise beer to Anheuser Busch who don’t want to see any competitors associated with the tournament. Bavaria Beer, a Netherlands based brewing company apparently paid some women to wear clothing manufactured by the company. They also gave away tickets and organised volunteers to “create a team wearing the Holland national colours but posing as Danish supporters”.
There doesn’t appear to be anything illegal in doing this, but FIFA maintain the group has contravened the South African Merchandise Marks Act which was recently amended to make room for commercial rights which may exceed the freedoms guaranteed by South Africa’s constitution.
It appears the “ambush marketing” tactic has more to do with the exposure gained by the arrests, than the actions in and of themselves. Since there is absolutely nothing distinguishing the women and their dresses from other similarly clad Dutch supporters — Orange is traditionally the colour associated with the Dutch Royal family. (See previous posting)
The group may have been “outed” in order to gain international exposure for the Bavaria brand. Bavaria Beer have ambushed the anti-ambush-marketers in the process.
Participants in the supposed “ambush” marketing campaign describe their arrest in a way which appears to give credence to this theory. It would appear that a sophisticated game of industrial espionage and police-work has resulted in the spectacle of Dutch Orange supporters being arrested for doing little more than wear Orange sporting apparel.
To look at this picture another way, imagine if a clothing manufacturer handed out beer in unmarked containers as part of a publicity stunt. The only thing linking the company to the product is the controversy. The thought police are going to have a hard time proving that the incident was part of an illegal marketing campaign, since it would appear the marketing was dependent upon the arrests being conducted and thus played up to the fears of the organisors.
FIFA has therefore been stung by its own stupidity in an elaborate cat and mouse game in which freedom — our freedom as a nation — is being sacrificed in the process.
FIFA president Joseph Blatter may have had this in mind when he described the women as “nothing more than advertising mules,” in the process reducing all women to a lower species in the animal kingdom. A mule is the offspring between a male donkey and a female horse, and Bavaria have risen to the occasion, calling on FIFA to ” stop intimidating Dutch dressed female supporters.”
While there doesn’t appear any legislation tackling the length or cut of women’s dresses in South Africa, and the only place where this kind of thing would raise a stir on the continent is Malawi, the new pro-FIFA legislation appears to outlaw certain types of branding with regard to clothing apparel in particular “ambush marketing”.
A nefarious term which doesn’t describe much — both marketing and branding are completely different activities. For instance, where does the market begin and end? Is our Freedom up for sale? As the old adage goes, “that government governs best which governs least” and “keep government outside the bedroom” – the question mark remains as to how far the law extends to the neither regions of the female anatomy? If the labels were on the inside, who can complain?
Only a moral prude with deviant thought patterns like the plutocrats in FIFA would stoop this low and the law may seriously run awry defining what is (and what isn’t) a dress in the process and fashion viz vi. sport as far as women are concerned.
So, no, Mr Blatter, this isn’t an ambush, its an invasion of privacy and denial of fundamental freedoms guaranteed by South Africa’s constitution.
My advice to FIFA fans: cut out your labels. Wear no-name brands and pray to god you not caught with a no-name brand with the colour Orange.
