A bizarre and dystopian new draft policy on data and the cloud proposes that government becomes co-owner of all data generated by the private sector in South Africa. The surveillance state is here.
On 1 April 2021, the government published a document that essentially says, ‘All your data are belong to us’.
It was no joke, but it was certainly written by a fool. I refer, of course, to the Draft National Policy on Data and Cloud, gazetted by Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams.
The comment period on the policy has been extended to 11 June 2021, and Dear South Africa is running a comment campaign for it.
It is hard to summarise the policy, since it is incredibly broad and vague, largely consisting of a mishmash of buzzwords that would have made the eyes of technology conference delegates glaze over a decade ago. It lacks definitions and any of the detail that might make it implementable. Livia Dyer, of law firm Bowmans, had a crack at it.
There are lots of objectives that sound profound to the uninitiated but are ultimately empty. They include the need to enhance investment opportunities, drive inclusive economic growth, create jobs and enhance skills development, enhance universal access to broadband connectivity, data and cloud services, remove regulatory barriers and enable competition, effectively implement data privacy, cloud privacy and cybersecurity measures, develop institutional mechanisms to govern data and cloud services, support small, medium and micro enterprises, advance technological developments, strengthen the state’s capacity to deliver services to the public, and promote South Africa’s data sovereignty and security.
It steps all over existing laws, bills and policy frameworks, including on such diverse subjects as universal broadband provision and cybersecurity. It is consistent with these only inasmuch as it is an equally muddled mess.
Big Brother
At the core of the policy is the creation of Big Brother. The proposal calls it a High-Performance Computing and Data Processing Centre (HPCDPC), which doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as smoothly.
Cobbled together from spare capacity in existing state-owned data centres, Big Brother will contain not only the cloud computing resources of government, but copies of all data generated in South Africa whether by local or foreign actors. All of it!
In one of the clearest statements of expropriation yet, it says that ‘all data generated within South Africa is the property of South Africa’. It doesn’t belong to whoever invested in generating it, but to the country as a whole.
Moreover, it says: ‘All data generated from South African natural resources,’ (whatever that means), ‘shall be co-owned by government and the private sector participant/s whose private funds were used to generate such, and a copy of such data shall be stored in the HPCDPC.’
This will apply to every South African company, organisation and individual.
According to Dyer, government will ‘establish frameworks … to share data generated by the public and private sectors in a fair, equitable and transparent manner’.
This would establish the kind of surveillance database that totalitarian despots can only dream of. Imagine all data – financial, legal, medical, journalistic, commercial, industrial and personal – being freely available to be shared by government entities, including law enforcement and state security.
The Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry calls it a ‘Snooper’s Charter, one more nail in the coffin of individual freedom in South Africa’.
It warns that the policy ‘raises alarming implications for data privacy and for increasing the costs of doing business,’ and ‘proposes sweeping new powers of state surveillance’.
With the government’s clear hostility to private property and to intellectual property rights, industrial designs, trade secrets and private market research would be at grave risk of being ‘shared’, supposedly for the benefit of ‘inclusive economic growth’.
Hacker target
Government will, it says, be responsible for the security of this data, and for ensuring data privacy. This is the same government that has itself suffered major hacks of highly sensitive data, and is the victim in more than half of all targeted cyber-attacks.
Not that the private sector doesn’t suffer breaches too, but imagine how juicy a target a single, centralised repository of all South African data would be. Placing any critical infrastructure under the control of a single entity puts it at increased risk from cyber-threats. Centralising all of it is, well, insane.
Perversely, the government believes that the policy will ‘enhance investment opportunities, drive inclusive growth,’ and all that good stuff, while at the same time burdening foreign companies that invest in South African data centres with the obligation to transfer skills and digital technology ‘to ensure that South Africans benefit from foreign direct investment (FDI)’.
In addition, government will take it upon itself to set standards and requirements for data exportability, interoperability, portability, trading and sharing. It wants ultimate control over all data produced in South Africa.
You don’t encourage investment by making investment more expensive. You don’t drive growth by creating more red tape. And you certainly don’t incentivise people to create valuable data by forcing them to share ownership with the government, and ultimately, with the South African public at large.
Any government that believes it is better at controlling data than those that produce it is delusional.
Encrypt everything!
If you’re in the encryption business, rejoice. I foresee a future in which everyone thoroughly encrypts all their data, in order to keep the government’s sticky fingers off it. This draft policy should be binned, in its entirety.
But, then, we’ve said the same thing about the Cybercrimes Bill, the Films and Publications Amendment Bill, and a host of others. This government seems endlessly capable of producing technically incompetent technology laws that do nothing other than aggrandise state power over private individuals.
Co-owning all data is just the logical conclusion of this government’s totalitarian instinct. Let’s encrypt, as a matter of self-defence.
[Image: PixxlTeufel from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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