State may be able to get personal with PCs
South Africans risk being spied on by their own government as strict new legislation - the Cybercrimes and Cybersecurity Bill - is tabled in parliament.
Watchdogs are warning that if the bill becomes law, the government will be able to access private information and the correspondence of ordinary citizens, which will have a chilling effect on the conduct of everyone who owns or uses a computer.
The bill is intended to fight cybercrime and computer-related abuses, but freedom of expression groups warn that the legislation's powers go beyond this.
Murray Hunter of civil rights watchdog Right2Know said there was a risk, for instance, that state security structures could use these powers to gain access to private networks. The State Security Agencycould declare that service providers were a critical information infrastructure, thereby accessing private citizens' data. This would save it the trouble of obtaining a court order to access specific individuals' data...
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