The mainstream newspapers in East Africa hardly reported on it,
and TVs didn’t give it a look, but if you can, check out CIPESA’s July
Policy Brief, that was published recently.
The ICT
Policy in East and Southern Africa’s brief looks at African government
requests to technology giants like Google, Yahoo, and social media firms
like Facebook, Twitter to disclose user information, remove content, or
block accounts.
It also spotlights requests to mobile
phone operators for subscriber information and data – you know, text
messages, and other naughty and subversive material on your devices.
African countries don’t come anywhere near western nations like the US, which makes tens of thousands of requests a year.
It is mostly still small beer. It is the trend that is more noteworthy.
Thus, according to Facebook, five African countries requested users’ details in the first half of 2013.
That
number had risen to 18 as at the end of 2016. Requests to remove
content from Google have also grown from only Libya in 2010 and 2011, to
four African countries in 2016 alone.
Twitter, says
the CIPESA brief, received one user information request from South Sudan
in 2012, but has since received requests from an additional four
countries.
The countries which have consistently made
the requests for user information to Google, Facebook and Twitter
include South Africa, Nigeria, Sudan, Kenya and Egypt.
But many others small players are in the game too, with requests ranging from one to 15.
Algeria, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Tunisia and Uganda have also sent in requests.
The
big numbers, though, are from the telco firms. Millicon, which is based
in Luxembuorg and operates in five African countries – Chad, Ghana,
Rwanda, Senegal and Tanzania under the Tigo brand – saw an increase in
metadata requests from 5,000 in 2015 to nearly 7,000 in 2006.
Most of these were related to “security”.
MTN
does not publish a transparency report, but Orange does. In 2014 Orange
received 23,020 user information requests from African governments.
This number doubled the following year to 48,819, and by 2016 it had hit 67,718 requests.
CIPESA
sees this as indicative of levels of surveillance, and information and
content control. There are, however, other insights to be gleaned.
It
seems the turning point was the Arab Spring of 2011, that toppled
strongmen Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia,
shook other countries in north Africa, and eventually laid waste to
Libya.
The data indicates that it is not necessarily
the divide between authoritarian vs democratic that helps predict these
user information requests, but political experience.
If you were bitten by the Arab Spring, whether you are democratic like Tunisia, or authoritarian like Egypt, you will snoop.
In
fact a curious reporting from the report is that apart from Egypt, most
seriously authoritarian regimes don’t bother Facebook and Google with
requests.
They are comfortable in the knowledge that their citizens are smart enough not to mess around.
It would seem that countries with hotly contested elections, like Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, will also put in calls.
The
one good thing from this, is that African governments are acknowledging
that the battlefronts of the future, are going to be digital.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3
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