Screenshot: Right2Know marches to the South African Parliament, October 2011.YouTube.South Africa’s new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has a great deal of work to do to fix the country’s state spy agencies. The most broken agencies are the Crime Intelligence Division of the South African Police Service (Saps) and the State Security Agency (SSA). At best, these agencies failed to prevent state capture by corrupt elements linked to former president Jacob Zuma, and at worst, they enabled state capture.
But what if Ramaphosa doesn’t take drastic actions to fix these agencies? Then we’ll have to rely on activists to push for the necessary changes.
But what types of activism work and what doesn’t in relation to state surveillance? In answering this question, it’s useful to draw some lessons from anti-surveillance activism in countries as diverse as the UK, South Africa and Mauritius.
