Founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the GNU operating system, Dr Richard Stallman, was in Johannesburg today for a talk at Wits University for Software Freedom Day. During the course of an almost two hour presentation, he came down strongly against the etolling system.

“Thanks to Ed Snowden, we know that the US government engages in unconscionable surveillance of its own citizens,” Stallman told a crowd of an audience of over around 200 people, “South Africa is worse. South African Spy agencies are specifically set up to spy on South African citizens, not their enemies… You’ve got to fight etolling. That’s just another surveillance system. They don’t need that level of surveillance to raise money. It’s gratuitous.”

“The NSA is officially supposed to spy only on foreign activities but has twisted this to the point where it spies on most of what Americans do, the corresponding South African agency doesn’t even claim to be focussing on foreigners, it’s purpose is to spy on citizens.”

Citing the example of the UK where roadside cameras with number plate recognition systems have been used to prevent known activists attending demonstrations – essentially engaging in ‘pre-crime’ arrests – Dr Stallman described etolling-type systems which log cars as they drive past and register drivers through payment systems as “a Sabotage of democracy, we can’t tolerate such systems and must recognise politicians that support them as enemies of our freedom.”

Stallman said that there are many alternatives to etolling available, including automated payment systems that anonymise the credentials of the driver.

With the local audience on side, Stallman went on to the subject of his talk, “A Free Digital Society”, describing the ways in which information uploaded to Facebook is used to monitor citizens in all countries as a matter of course.

“A mobile phone is Stalin’s dream,” Stallman said, “They’re a tool for surveillance. The only way to turn them off and prevent them becoming listening devices is to take out the battery and – in some cases – smash the capacitors inside too.”

Stallman famously refuses to carry a mobile phone himself.

Addressing the students in the audience, Stallman said that they should refuse to write code or participate in projects that won’t be released under free software licences, as part of his mission to discourage proprietary software on the grounds of personal freedom.

“Your responsibility is to pressure the school to move to free software and teach people to recognise the issue,” he said, “Personal resistance is very effective.”

When asked about a recent report that suggested Africa has fewer than 4 600 developers registered with Github, Stallman said that the apparently low number of free software developers wasn’t the issue.

“It makes no difference to me where the developers are,” Stallman said, “Free software is an international project. I’m not particularly concerned with how many developers there are in this part of the world or that part of the world, I’m more concerned with trying to recruit more people to work on the most important things – the projects that are most crucial to – the issue of freedom. And making people aware that this is an issue of freedom, and not just that some software is available and convenient.”

He was also cautious of the so-called ‘tech revolution’ in Africa, and the value of tech hubs around the continent.

“Some people are benefiting somewhat from them, but it’s probably a drop in the bucket compared to the size of Africa,” he said, “Just because a small amount of jobs are created doesn’t mean they are good. They might be good, but if what they are doing is making software that denies people’s freedom I think it’s better if they didn’t do it and that software didn’t exist.”

I asked Dr Stallman what he thought about the fact that a lot of software development across Africa is being funded by companies like Microsoft, Google, BlackBerry et al.

“I don’t think that the crucial question is who’s funding it,” Stallman said, “You might worry in the long term about who benefits, but that doesn’t make it good or bad today. What makes it good or bad today is what they’re doing [and the software they’re producing]. Ethics becomes easier if we judge activities by where they are rather than where they come from.”

At the end of his presentation, Stallman also auctioned off a toy wildebeest to raise money for the Free Software Foundation, which was sold for R3 000 at the end of his talk. Taking a playful jibe at Linux supporters who don’t recognise GNU as an essential part of the popular operating system, he pointed out “If you already have a penguin, buy a gnu. Without GNU the penguin doesn’t work.”

If you missed Dr Richard Stallman’s speech at Wits, you can catch him at SITA in Pretoria on 3rd September, UCT in Cape Town on 4th September and Durban on 6th September.