Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- National security surveillance and anti-capitalism: A theoretical discussion -- Doing security differently? National security surveillance in southern Africa. -- Lawful interception as imperialism -- Mass surveillance and national security imperialism -- The global trade in spyware -- Police as spies: Securitization of protests and intelligence-led policing -- Fortress South Africa: Securitizing identity and border management -- Conclusion

In spite of Edward Snowden's disclosures about government abuses of dragnet communication surveillance, the surveillance industry continues to expand around the world. Many people have become resigned to a world where they cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy. In this open access book, the author looks at what can be done to rein in these powers and restructure how they are used beyond the limited and often ineffective reforms that have been attempted. Using southern Africa as a backdrop, and its liberation history, Jane Duncan examines what an anti-capitalist perspective on intelligence and security powers could look like. Are the police and intelligence agencies even needed, and if so, what should they do and why? What lessons can be learnt from how security was organised during the struggles for liberation in the region? Southern Africa is seeing thousands of people in the region taking to the streets in protests. In response, governments are scrambling to acquire surveillance technologies to monitor these new protest movements. Southern Africa faces no major terrorism threats at the moment, which should make it easier to develop clearer anti-surveillance campaigns than in Europe or the US. Yet, because of tactical and strategic ambivalence about security powers, movements often engage in limited calls for intelligence and policing reforms, and fail to provide an alternative vision for policing and intelligence. Surveillance and Intelligence in Southern Africa examines what that vision could look like. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

In 2013, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret documents revealing that state agencies like the NSA had spied on the communications of millions of innocent citizens. International outrage resulted, but the Snowden documents revealed only the tip of the surveillance iceberg. Apart from insisting on their rights to tap into communications, more and more states are placing citizens under surveillance, tracking their movements and transactions with public and private institutions. The state is becoming like a one-way mirror where it can see more of what its citizens do and say, while citizens see less and less of what the state does, owing to high levels of secrecy around surveillance. Jane Duncan assesses the relevance of Snowden's revelations for South Africa. In doing so she questions the extent to which South Africa is becoming a surveillance society governed by a surveillance state. Is surveillance used for the democratic purpose of making people safer, or is it being used for the repressive purpose of social control, especially of those considered to be politically threatening to ruling interests? What kind of collective is needed to ensure that unaccountable surveillance does not take place? What works and what does not work as organised responses? These questions and more are examined in this penetrating analysis of South African and global democracy. Stopping the Spies is aimed at South African citizens, academics as well for general readers who care about our democracy and the direction it is taking.

Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations and Acronyms -- Introduction -- 1 Protests and State Repression: An International Perspective -- 2 Understanding the Right to Protest in South Africa -- 3 The Legislative and Policy Context for the Right to Protest in South Africa -- 4 The Right to Protest in Repressive Contexts: The Cases of the Mbombela and eThekwini Municipalities -- 5 Political Diversity and the Right to Protest in Metropolitan Municipalities: Johannesburg and the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro

Using a critical political economy perspective, this article focusses on the migration from analogue to Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) in South Africa. Drawing on relevant international examples, it explores whether South Africa's regulator is realising one of the major promises of the DTT transition, namely, to create more media diversity in the television sector. It analyses decisions taken by the communications regulator in allocating the digital multiplexes and whether these are contributing to broadening the public sphere. Sadly, in spite of the promise that the transition held, there are signs of it leading to reduced diversity and an upward redistribution of spectrum to upper-income brackets. Commercial broadcasting has become even more dominant than it was in the analogue space, which has intensified what Robert Horwitz has called a 'commercialising juggernaut' in television. These developments risk turning the country's policy of three tiers of broadcasting – already under strain – into a policy in name only. Working class audiences that rely on public service television especially are being dispossessed of spectrum, depriving them of the resources necessary to speak to and be heard by mass audiences. The article asks why the DTT transition has come to this, and in attempting to answer this question, it critiques dominant theories of regulatory behaviour (including critical ones) as being overly structuralist in approach and not taking sufficient account of the agency needed to bring about a decommodified television system where the power to make symbolic resources is not determined by wealth.

In 2011, the Press Freedom Commission (PFC) was established to recommend the most appropriate regulatory form for South Africa's press, in the wake of the ruling African National Congress's (ANC) criticism of the existing system of self-regulation as toothless and self-serving. The ANC has argued for the establishment of a statutory Media Appeals Tribunal. South Africa is not the only country having these debates. In the wake of the phone hacking scandal in Britain, an enquiry chaired by Lord Justice Leveson also considered alternative regulatory forms to self-regulation, given the failure of the Press Complaints Commission to stem the ethical excesses of the tabloid press. Several Southern African governments either have instituted or are considering instituting statutory regulation, and politicians are wasting no time in capitalizing on developments in Britain to drive a press control agenda. This article considers the merits of arguments for and against press self-regulation in South Africa, and options for the future. Using a political economy analysis, it argues that while the system has proved to be very effective in monitoring and adjudicating ethical breaches, it has been implicitly designed to cause minimal offence to the industry, and recent reforms have only partly addressed the problem.

This article draws on the early press coverage of the Marikana massacre to explore the extent to which South Africa's media transformation has delivered an inclusive public sphere that allows for deliberative debate on issues that really matter to the country. While adopting a critical approach to the normative assumptions underpinning the Habermasian public sphere, this article will argue that South Africa's negotiated 'miracle' transition has provided a framework for media transformation that has both opened up spaces for media democratisation and constrained their ability totransform to the extent that they established common public spaces for deliberative debate. South Africa's media transformation has shaped and been shaped by the growing division of South Africa into a two tier society of 'haves' and 'have nots', fuelling social instability, especially among the youth. This article traces the roots of this troubling picture back to the nature of South Africa's incomplete transition.

Destroying Democracy, volume six of the Democratic Marxism series, focuses on how decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded the global democratic project and how, in the process, rising authoritarianism is expressing itself in divisive and exclusionary politics, populist political parties and movements, increased distrust in fact-based information and news, and the withering accountability of state institutions. Over the last four decades, democracy has radically shifted to a market democracy in which all aspects of human, non-human and planetary life are commodified and corporations have become more powerful than states and their citizens. This is how neoliberal capitalism functions at a systemic level and if left unchecked is the greatest threat to democracy and a sustainable planet. The authors home in on four country cases – India, Brazil, South Africa and the United States of America to interrogate issues of politics, ecology, state security, media, access to information and political parties, and affirm the need to reclaim and re-build an expansive and inclusive democracy. The book is an invaluable resource for all who are interested in understanding the threats to democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism in the global south and the global north.