Chikane should test chicanery
OUR National Intelligence Agency spooks used to boast, “if you can hear it, it isn’t us” whenever they were confronted with accusations from activists in democratic South Africa that they were hearing the same clicks and other noises on the line as under apartheid.
Technology is the most outstanding tool, but the ease with which it allows us to do things cannot, and does not, ever allow carte blanche for its application. Individuals have age old rights – in this country, enshrined in our constitution – which prioritise privacy and dignity. And indeed, these extend to patrimonial rights, intellectual capital and business intelligence.
While the state comes under fire all the time for any untoward tapping or interception of private communications, which it might do in the national interest, and which we are always on guard against, we never seem to apply the same to corporates or private entities.
The reality, however, is we have laws that prohibit the illegal interception of privileged communications, and those laws also cover businesses which might wish to undermine their rivals, or candidates to their profits.
Recently, though, stories relating to exactly that have appeared, looking like the plot of a bad thriller novel. Sister paper the Sunday Independent, for instance, recently broke the chilling tale of a Grabber machine, a mystery that was duly confirmed two days afterwards by senior intelligence sources.
It was that very revelation which led Reverend Frank Chikane to approach our other sister paper The Star to tell how he his own life had been negatively affected by this kind of interception.
Chikane’s story was especially unsettling because of South Africa’s history of unscrupulous state organisations, particularly during the apartheid era, and the association with dirty tricks. Nowadays, though, there is great deal more with which to be concerned in terms of privacy than simply the state.
Private companies are engaged in clandestine activities which would have surprised apartheid’s agencies with their secrecy, while even cellphone companies sell and give their customers’ information away. Enough already.
Chikane should become a test case for the book to be thrown at people caught illegally using another person’s private information for their own gain. If we don’t, we’re all in peril.