The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
June 5th marks the one-year anniversary of Edward Snowden's revelations about the U.S. National Security Agency’s egregious overstepping of its bounds into ordinary people's private communications. Journalist Glenn Greenwald who broke the story recently said that the U.S. government is making an example of Snowden and Chelsea Manning to scare future whistleblowers. He argues that the U.S. government is "furious" about Snowden being protected because he’s created a...
Privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian sees the landscape of government surveillance shifting beneath our feet, as an industry grows to support monitoring programs. Through private companies, he says, governments are buying technology with the capacity to break into computers, steal documents and monitor activity without detection. Journalists and activists, amongst others, have been targets of these programmes in countries that have purchased surveillance software.
Gamma is a German...
Recent events have exposed the fact that the U.S. is performing blanket surveillance on any foreigner whose data passes through an American entity -- whether they are suspected of wrongdoing or not. This means that, essentially, every international user of the Internet is being watched. Finnish computer expert, Mikko Hypponen asks: How can we protect digital privacy in the age of government surveillance? He says, “If we need a big brother, I would rather have a domestic big brother than...
Jane Duncan -
The South African media are awash with stories about the recent terrorist attack on the Westgate mall in Kenya, allegedly undertaken by Al Shabaab. The State Security Agency (SSA) and the beleaguered Crime Intelligence Division of the police stand accused of having missed vital intelligence on Samantha Lewthwaite (the ‘white widow’) and others allegedly linked to Al Shabaab.
There is an important debate to be had about the sources of this intelligence and their interests....
Two months ago, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian newspaper published his first article revealing the existence of a secret court order for Verizon to hand over the telephone records of millions of Americans to the National Security Agency. Since then, The Guardian has published a trove of articles detailing the NSA’s vast surveillance powers based on documents leaked by whistleblower, Edward Snowden. Last week, Snowden was granted temporary asylum for one year in Russia. Greenwald...
Jane Duncan -
Recent revelations by former National Security Agency (NSA) computer analyst Edwin Snowden that the NSA was undertaking unwarranted mass surveillance of Americans has thrown the communications surveillance activities of governments into sharp relief.
Can the abuses that are taking place in the United States (US) happen in South Africa too? The communications of South Africans are probably already being caught in the NSA dragnet, given that cloud services like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo...
