
Africa's Worst New Internet Censorship Law Could Be Coming to South Africa - ghosh
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/africas-worst-new-internet-censorship-law-could-be-coming-south-africa
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buyx
The only saving grace is that the Department of Home Affairs (of which the
Film and Publications Board is part) is so incompetent that their reach
exceeds their grasp, and it is relatively easy to circumvent their
authoritarian tendencies.

Until recently many South African Apple device owners had Kenya accounts to
buy games (including most educational content) because of the Board's refusal
to allow South African App Store games without rating every game itself
(eventually they relented).

Home Affairs, which also handles citizenship and immigration, is a mess, and
has made the South African passport worthless thanks to rampant corruption and
incompetence (historically anyway- corruption may be improving a bit, but the
damage is done).

Their latest trick: to require burdensome documentation from international
travelers with children ostensibly to combat child trafficking (because of by
dubious data from a lobby group that caught a Minister's ear). It's expected
to severely dent the Sputh African tourism industry.

TlDr: Even if these proposed censorship regulations come to pass, it is
unlikely that they will have much of an effect thanks to the incompetence of
the would-be censors.

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jorangreef
As a South African, the department of Home Affairs in the Western Cape is
actually doing an excellent job regarding birth certificates, passports, ids
etc. The bottleneck is in Gauteng.

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buyx
As I intimated, things are improving in some areas thanks to improved IT
system controls, but the quality of the improvement is very very uneven. Even
in Gauteng, some offices function excellently, while others are awful. It
comes down to the individual branch managers.

There still are huge bottlenecks in dealing with "refugee" claims, and with
the legal immigration processes, and the legacy of past corruption (last 25
years) is still haunting South Africa. Based on overall performance, I think
"incompetent" is still a fair characterisation.

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lusus
Sounds about right for the fpb in sa. They make a lot of talk about protecting
against pornography specifically child pornography. Given south Africa's
current trend of sexual violence against minors it's understandable but they
are pretty much unable to enforce anything.

The sa government has a very mediocre understanding overall of how the
technology that makes up the Internet works and likes to propose rather broad
and technically unfeasable laws that inevitably are either ignored or
eventually abandoned.

It wasn't that long ago that they expected any isp to be keeping packet logs
of any traffic through thier network for a period of five years on the off
chance that the police might need it. It took a fair bit of back and forth to
get them to realize how absurd such an approach was.

I would expect that if this does come to pass and youtube is blocked etc, that
even the most naïve user will suddenly discover what a vpn is and life will
continue. ( never underestimate the technological capability of someone ,
including your grandmother, to find a way to watch thier cat videos on the
Internet )

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guard-of-terra
Больше ада! Aka, worse is better.

The idea here is: reasoning does not work. You reason for good things, against
stupid laws, but you have no leverage. We'll have to walk thru pain, "fear and
loathing", most of those laws will be passed somewhere, in a few years or
decades they'll prove to not work. Then they will be gradually repelled. Now
there will be leverage: "this law was tried in a country CCC and it went
sour".

We humans actually suck at designing something (like laws). Our only bet is
evolution. You can't reason. You can only show. So we'll have to try ideas
even when it's obvious they're stupid.

~~~
PebblesHD
Sadly, the notion that 'It was tried in <country name> and didnt work so we
should avoid it' doesn't really apply to politics. Consider Australia's
current internet censorship and metadata legislation, the same laws have been
tried all over Europe, the US, Asia and a host of other countries and proved
worthless, and yet the government pushes forward with them. Its simply for
appearances, the leadership needs to look like its tough on whatever the hot
topic of the hour is.

~~~
guard-of-terra
They have to be repelled somewhere in order to be proven worthless.

~~~
PebblesHD
I would be inclined to argue that their ineffectiveness at achieving their
stated purpose combined with their gross violation of the privacy of everyone
in the countries affected makes them worthless.

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mhuffman
I am all for multi-tasking, but you would really think that Africa would have
bigger fish to fry right now, without worrying about censoring the Internet.

~~~
thescrewdriver
Ah yes, the good old republic of Africa. Who is the president of Africa?

~~~
mhuffman
You're right of course. I was referring to the rare countries in Africa that
social, economic, and health issues. My apologies.

~~~
thescrewdriver
SA, like any country, has a variety of issues. Check out:
[http://www.news24.com](http://www.news24.com) for a better idea of current
issues.

~~~
mhuffman
That is a very interesting link. Thank you. The electricity situation, in
particular, I was unaware of.

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lovelearning
Is the Internet really the biggest problem around, that governments spend so
much time and effort controlling it? It's become a bike shed for governments.

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markatkinson
Yes, I am from South Africa, and right now I have to remote into my home
computer to shut it down, before our power provider (parastatal monopoly
Eskom), shuts down the power across the whole of Cape Town for 2.5 hours
because they are so severely miss managed.

But yes, this seems appropriate.

As others have mentioned if this actually became legitimate it would mean
nothing. They have nobody to police this.

~~~
spitcode
The problem is that when they do find someone the law is in place

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einrealist
How is publication specified? Is it a single word, a character, a millisecond
of sound or video? I wonder how that scales. Could be the first real DoS of a
ministry. Bring it on....

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coldcode
Everyone wants to crush their citizens. Except Iceland, maybe.

~~~
tomjen3
They want to ban porn though.

Any country left that actually cares about freedom, other than Germany?

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Xylakant
> Any country left that actually cares about freedom, other than Germany?

Last time I checked (5 minutes ago), we didn't. (german speaking)

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kuschku
The day when even the Spiegel titles

"DER VERRAT – BND und Bundesregierung gegen deutsche Interessen"

(in english: "THE TREASON – BND and federal government vs. German interests")

you really can’t say the country cares about freedom :/

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spitcode
Sign the petition, make it stop! [https://www.change.org/p/film-and-
publications-board-stop-th...](https://www.change.org/p/film-and-publications-
board-stop-the-internet-censorship)

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demarq
That is some North Korean level of crazy!

