Spying and democracy

 

strong objections. The so-called “champions of democracy” complained that the Government was, by introducing the communication law, infringing on basic human rights by invading the privacy of its citizens.

The Interception of Communications Act, when it was eventually passed, sounded quite mellow when compared to other countries’ information laws.
The Act allows certain communications to be intercepted or monitored in the course of their transmission through telecommunications or the postal service. Such messages would include electronic content such as telephones, fax and email.

The Interception of Communications Act proposes the establishment of a Monitoring of Interception of Communications Centre that would be the sole facility through which authorised interceptions would be effected. The fact that today, about seven years after the law was passed such a Communication Centre does not exist, shows just how lax and flexible authorities are.

There are no violent clampdowns like the activists predicted and the initial fears are turning out to be much ado over nothing. The minister under the Act is mandated with issuing a warrant to authorised persons where there is reasonable suspicion that a serious offence has been or is being committed or that there is a threat to national security.

Provision is made for review by the Attorney-General of the minister’s exercise of the power to issue the warrants.
The Interception of Communications Act, even if it was to have all statutes implemented, would have probably been just as placid as it is today. In recent days, Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former CIA technical assistant-turned-whistle-blower, exposed the way the United States’ National Security Agency by outlining how it illegally and unethically gains information from internet companies as well as US telecoms using a secret programme called PRISM.

The agent is currently in Hong Kong underground fighting extradition. When the privacy laws were explained to the public before the Hong Kong leak, NSA personnel gave the impression that the agency was supposed to only spy on suspicious-sounding or looking foreigners. Critics to the United States spy law say the authoritarian surveillance; the treating of the constitution and Congress’s laws as mere formalities is one of the worst violations of human rights.

It is not even a fine print in the law or constitution but the NSA has given itself the divine right to access the content of emails and phone calls of Americans inside their country, without a warrant. It does not deny that they have unlimited access to contents of any call.

Frighteningly, they do not rule out the possibility of the NSA using contractors, or speech-to-text, or some other indirect method, to accomplish “listening in” by other means. US is not the only country currently at odds with own citizens over spy laws. Britain’s eavesdropping is performed by GCHQ security agency, which authorities claim was legal and constituted no threat to privacy laws in that country.

But newspaper reports from both sides of the Atlantic suggest that the PRISM programme used by NSA to spy on its own citizens was also used on Britons by the United States and findings were handed over to British intelligence. This means that Britain is just as guilty as the United States in all this and as a willing accomplice; the former cannot throw its weight around in developing nations boasting of outstanding human rights records.

Australia and New Zealand, as well as other developed world countries with strong intelligence links with the United States, are raising concerns about whether they have co-operated with secret electronic data mining. So the secret is out — the US and Britain, two countries that were so vocal about Zimbabwe’s Interception of Communications Act, are themselves authors of legislation that is both illegal and unethical.

Zimbabweans are under minimal intelligence surveillance just like any citizens in many other countries. They have freedom of speech as evidenced by political inferences on social networking sites. Most are unaware that there is a big difference between ridiculing President Mugabe and doing the same to, say, Morgan Tsvangirai.

Section 16 of Public Order and Security Act No. 1 2002 prohibits the publication of statements undermining the authority of the President or that are abusive, indecent or false about or concerning the President.

Those unaware of the above and more aligned to smaller political parties will continue to insult the President in public forums, but even if they have the awareness that they risk prosecution, they are unlikely to change, because everyone knows that in spite of all the propaganda, Zimbabwe respects its people’s human rights more than any of the so-called “Democracy Champions”.