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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my colleagues and comrades in the MPDP, especially Julie Reid and Viola Milton, for their unstinting support of the work that led to this book. The Department of Journalism, Film and Television at UJ acted as a host for the project, and for that I would like to thank the former head of department, Ylva Rodny-Gumede, and the current head, Dumisani Moyo, as well as the departmental administrator, Amy Maphagela, and her predecessor, Emmerentia Breytenbach. The OSF-SA provided funding for the research project that informs this book, and I thank them profusely for that. The OSF-SA continues to be an unstinting supporter of work that seeks to strengthen the quality of our democracy, even if this work puts them on the wrong side of power, and I thank them for their courageousness and their foresight. In particular, I would like to single out the following OSF staffers for their support: Fatima Hassan, Allan Wallis and Leonie Sampson. Although they have now left the OSF-SA, Vinayak Bhardwaj and Michael Moss were instrumental in ensuring that the OSF-SA supported the project, and I thank them for that too.

My thanks to the Mail & Guardian, Daily Maverick, Sunday Times and open-Democracy for having carried opinion pieces I have written on surveillance and privacy in South Africa. I remain indebted to Fazila Farouk, former owner and publisher of the South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS), which provided a platform for my early writings on these issues; these opinion pieces formed the basis of this manuscript. I must also acknowledge the contribution of Ronnie Kasrils, a former Minister of Intelligence, who acted as a respondent to my inaugural lecture, which is incorporated into this manuscript. I thank the APC’s executive director, Anriette Esterhuysen, for the opportunity to undertake a research project into journalists and communications surveillance, and to allow me to incorporate some of this research material into this manuscript, as well as Stephan Hofstatter and Mzilikazi wa Afrika, for having contributed as interviewees to this research.

Avani Singh, Dale McKinley and Nora Ní Loideain conducted research for the MPDP for the Privacy International project on privacy in South Africa. The Privacy International team were unwavering in their assistance when I asked for it during the writing of this book (and that was often). The Legal Resources Centre also assisted with information on aspects of the book. I would also like to thank the following people for agreeing to be interviewed for the book, or for providing information in response to requests: Gus Hosein, Scarlet Kim, Tomaso Falchetta and Caroline Wilson Palow, Claire Lauterbach, Matthew Rice, Edin Omanovic and Alexandrine Pirlot de Corbion from Privacy International; Eric King and Javier Ruiz from Don’t Spy on Us; James Welch from Liberty; former RICA judge Yvonne Mokgoro; Sam Sole, Stefaans Brümmer and Karabo Rajuili from the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, Ant Brooks, special advisor to the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA), Thulani Mavuso from the Department of Home Affairs, Charles Nqakula, the chairperson of the parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence; Stephan Hofstatter from the Sunday Times; and Wayne Minnaar and Gert van der Berg from the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD), who took me on a guided tour of the JMPD closed-circuit television (CCTV) control centre. I have also included previously unused interview material with Dennis Dlomo, then co-ordinator for government intelligence and head of the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee, conducted at the end of 2013 at the SSA offices. There are also many interviewees who contributed to the research and journalism through agreeing to semi-structured interviews or focus groups, and who cannot be acknowledged by name as they were granted confidentiality as part of the interview process. They know who they are. I thank them for their courage in speaking out, and hope that in time to come, it will become easier for people to speak out about the issues touched on in this book, without fear of retribution. Only once they can do so, can we really say that we live in a robust democracy.

I would also like to thank SAHA for filing information requests to the City of Johannesburg, the South African Parliament and the Civil Aviation Authority. The records these bodies released in response to these requests are useful, although they were not as comprehensive as they could have been. Lasse Skou Andersen, a journalist with the Danish publication Dagbladet Information, was also extremely helpful and I thank him for making some of his records available, released in response to a series of information requests to the various European Union (EU) governments.

I would also like to acknowledge the R2K, of which I am a member, and which has provided me with such a rich intellectual climate for this work. The collaboration between the MPDP and R2K has been an extremely important one, as the MPDP provides research resources for the activist work of R2K, which strengthens the work of both organisations: R2K uses the research to undertake informed advocacy, and the MPDP’s research is put to use, rather than gathering dust on the shelves of university libraries. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the support of the Secrecy and Securitisation Focus Group, and especially its convener, Murray Hunter, who has been unwavering in his support and his willingness to act as a sounding board. Both he and Heidi Swart read and commented on several chapters, and I thank them for their attentiveness.

The team at Wits University Press have been extremely supportive of this book from the moment I approached the press with the initial book idea. I would like to thank publisher Veronica Klipp, commissioning editor Roshan Cader, project manager Julie Miller and editor Russell Martin, the two anonymous peer reviewers who reviewed the manuscript, as well as the entire team that contributed towards the production of this book.

Sadly, but not unexpectedly, there are those whom I cannot thank as they failed to respond to interviews or requests for information. For most of 2017, I attempted to secure an interview with the Minister of State Security, but to no avail. Eventually, I asked the ministry to delegate the request to a suitable person in the SSA, but still did not receive a response. They have only themselves to blame if their voices are not included in this book. The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and the office of the Inspector General of Intelligence refused interviews at the time of request, on the basis that the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism had filed a constitutional challenge to sections of RICA, and as they were cited as respondents, they did not want to grant interviews until the case was concluded. I appreciate their responses, but my position on this matter is that the sub judice rule is largely an anachronism, in that they would have to prove substantial and demonstrable threats to the administration of justice for the rule to apply. In any event, there was no reason not to grant interviews once the respondents had filed their responding papers as their positions were known publicly, which was the case with the SSA. I also tried to secure an interview with the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC), but was unable to before the book went to print. Telkom turned down an interview request on the basis that company policy did not allow its officials to speak on behalf of the company with regard to legislation affecting the sector, and referred me to the Department of Justice: a bit odd for a company that is meant to operate at arm’s length from the government. A request for them to reconsider went unanswered. An interview request to Vastech yielded a bland statement, and my follow-up request for an interview went unanswered. While writing this book with little official information was difficult, it was not impossible. Happily, surveillance researchers are not dependent on official sources of information anymore; more investigative journalists and whistleblowers are shining a light into this dark and murky area of government, providing us with unprecedented amounts of information about its inner workings. Governments are losing control of the flow of information about how, why and when they spy on their citizens. This book would not have been possible without the important work of the whistleblowing site WikiLeaks and the people who provided it with information, and the incredibly principled actions of Edward Snowden, who made huge personal sacrifices to bring evidence of surveillance abuses to public attention. I remain indebted to them.