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ANC gen sec wants to be watching you

Remember that thing where people get scared by current events and start trading civil liberties at increasingly high speeds in ways they’ll ultimately regret? You know, things like the post-9/11 Patriot Act leading to PRISM in the US, and similar loss of the right to privacy in the UK? Civil liberty campaigners in South Africa should feel their spider senses tingling this morning after a rather chilling announcement by the ANC’s Secretary General Gwede Mantashe yesterday.

According to a report on the Independent Online, Mantashe spoke to journalists after the ANC’s NEC meeting regarding a response to the Westgate mall attack in Kenya last week. Quite understandably, South Africa has been placed on a high state of alert following fears that at least one of the attackers lived here and had forged South African ID documents. Even without any direct link to the attack, it would be a dereliction of duty for any sub-Saharan government with porous borders not to be on the watch for more headline grabbing trouble from extremists.

But the response has to be appropriate. According to the Independent and Eye Witness News, the government’s security cluster has been tasked with coming up with that response. But that hasn’t stopped Mantashe – a member of the Communist Party’s politburo – from making it clear what he wants.

There is a higher need for tighter immigration laws and processes to strengthen the security features of South African identity documents and the monitoring of movements of people in general and suspicious movements in particular.

That’s my use of bold text up there, of course. I draw attention to it because “the monitoring of movements of people in general” goes hand in hand with the first part of that statement, regarding ‘secure’ ID documents. More ‘secure’ documents, like the new eID cards currently being introduced in South Africa by the Department of Home Affairs means building a larger and more intrusive database full of tasty biometric information to support them. And those databases get out of hand, used for things they were never designed for.

Your current ID card, for example, was never designed to get you in to certain parking lots or hotel complexes. Yet because it’s the one form of ID you always have with you, that’s what it gets used for. The new card is only supposed to be used for government services. Initially. With all the digital markers on the new cards and readers capable of cross-referencing the national database in real-time, how long will it be before it’s requested by every security guard with a $10 reader and anyone who knows the right few people to bribe will be able to build up an exact map of your movements any time they want?

Not long, I’ll wager. After all, a database with those characteristics is exactly what Mantashe has just said he wants to build, in not so many words.

More pertinent, perhaps, is the age old question of how many terror attacks all this extra surveillance might stop. As we know, the Spanish ID card system didn’t stop an attack on a train in Madrid in 2004, and the 9/11 attackers had forged documents for several countries, including  Germany where ID cards are mandatory.

And there is little evidence that the world’s largest and most prolific program for monitoring the movement and communication of citizens, PRISM, has been in any way more effective in thwarting terror attacks than more traditional intelligence techniques.

What is for certain is that the new eID card will cost more than R5bn to implement, and a similar ‘secure’ smartcard system in Taiwan (albeit from a different manufacturer) was recently broken wide open allowing forgeries to be made thanks to a show-stopping bug in the crypto that researchers have known about since 2008.

One thing I’m fairly sure of is that there are much bigger issues that should be the focus of NEC attention than mass surveillance and yet more identity documents. The current law enforcement community is unable to deal with almost as many deaths on South African roads every day as happened in the horror of Westgate. There’s no future guarantee that these suggestions could stop a Westgate-type incident in South Africa any more than they can prevent rape or murder or any of the other social problems South Africa faces.

The mantra which I’ve always believed and the message that seems to have been coming from Kenyans over the last few days is that if terror attacks or the threat of terror attacks lead to fear, loss of liberty and a more divisive state, then the terrorists have won. Knee jerk reactions which lead to loss of civil liberties never, ever work.

 

(Image: Shutterstock)

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