{"id":324,"date":"2007-06-19T07:13:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-19T05:13:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-06-19T07:13:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-19T05:13:00","slug":"a-foolish-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/telecoms\/324-a-foolish-bill.html","title":{"rendered":"A foolish bill"},"content":{"rendered":"

But that is exactly what is happening with a bill designed to thwart terrorism by making sure every cellphone in SA can be linked directly to its owner. <\/font><\/p>\n

The theory is that criminals will not use a phone to organise a crime, nor terrorists use a phone to trigger a bomb, if the authorities can trace it back to them. <\/font><\/p>\n

Cue the Interception of Communication and Provision of Communication Related Information Amendment Bill, which demands that everybody entering the country must have their handset dismantled and the 25-digit serial number inside recorded. <\/font><\/p>\n

Several glaring faults immediately stand out to all except the legislators. For a start, terrorists planning to use their phone for nefarious activities are, it would seem, unlikely to stand in an extremely lengthy queue to declare it. So every bag entering SA would have to be x-rayed at the immigration counters. <\/font><\/p>\n

Second, even the paranoid US and equally nervous British governments have not (yet) decreed that anyone crossing their borders must have their phone dismantled and registered. If they believe that bottles holding more than 100ml of shampoo pose a greater mortal danger than a cellphone, that does suggest that SA is going over the top. <\/font><\/p>\n

The proposed law also affects South Africans, by requiring anyone buying a handset or airtime to have their name, home address, business address, ID number, telephone number and the handset and SIM card serial numbers recorded. Collecting such vast amounts of data would hit roughly 38-million people. All for the sake of capturing a snippet that may be used against a minute fraction who use a phone in a crime in a way that is traceable. <\/font><\/p>\n

Since smart criminals would figure out a way to avoid that registration, the system will inconvenience everybody and probably thwart nobody. And how will the system work when a rural resident with no formal address buys a R5 top-up voucher from a street vendor not literate enough to keep records? <\/font><\/p>\n

As Vodacom CEO Alan Knott Craig has previously argued, it is impossible to obtain all the details because 15-million people do not have identity documents, and 15 million people do not live in a street with a name and number. Which would mean that they could not have a cellphone, either. <\/font><\/p>\n

That is of little concern to the proposed law, however, which suggests fining service providers R100000 a day if they fail to obtain the details of everyone using their network. The sheer lunacy of the bill is even more apparent in proposing that a service provider could have its licence revoked. There are doubts about whether that is legal, as licences are granted by the Independent Communications Authority of SA, which has a constitutional right to independence. <\/font><\/p>\n

So the bill may be derailed for being constitutionally unsound — rather than because it is clearly nonsense. Either way, it is a sad reflection of how politicians can lose touch with reality.<\/font><\/p>\n

Comments<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GOOD intentions should never be used to justify bad legislation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecoms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}