The State hates Technology

Information technology is the antithesis to the Total State.  The state is cumbersome and unresponsive, new technology is nimble and caters for diverse needs.  The state is big and brash, technology is small and subtle.  The state cannot get things done, new technology gets things done all day every day for millions of people.  The state depletes wealth, technology is the dynamic agent of wealth creation.  The state is behind the curve, technology keeps us ahead of the curve.

With such great differences it is no wonder the state hates the dynamism and efficiency of new information technologies.  This is evidenced in the fact that government tends to adopt new technologies very late, cannot adapt new technologies quickly and dynamically enough before progress and redundancies set in, and tries in the end to regulate the life out of new technology because it cannot understand it, cannot control it, and cannot trust it.

The most recent joke comes out of the Middle East and India as regulators try to ban the Blackberry due to security concerns.

This Bloomberg piece on it is rather cumbersome but summarises the issue well enough.  However these two paragraphs near the bottom just about get the message across in its entirety [HA emphasis]:

BlackBerry devices, introduced in the U.A.E. in 2006, enable users to send messages that can’t be monitored as allowed under the country’s 2007 Safety, Emergency and National Security rules, the regulator said last week. Encryption allows them to avoid monitoring, it said today.

“This is going to be resolved,” said Irfan Ellam, an analyst at Al Mal Capital PJSC in Dubai, who has “outperform” ratings on Etisalat and Du. “These are issues that have been brought up in other countries, where they’ve found a solution, and there’s no reason to think they won’t do the same here.”

Indeed.  A ’solution’ is never far off when the state doesn’t like something, especially when it comes to controlling information and monitoring the grubby chatter of its peasantry.

It reminds us of the RICA legislation here in SA.  What’s RICA?  Oh, that would be short for the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act.  ie the law that says the state can tap your privacy.

George Bush was labeled a Hitler when he pushed to pass laws like this.  In South Africa we grin and bear it because our political discourse is not mature enough to deal with such a debate when the ‘real’ issues are poverty and hunger and joblessness etc etc.  But this is a big issue because the baseline premise is that the state has the right to consider tapping private information flows.  That this does not profoundly worry people is usually because they’re trapped in a cocooned stasis and have an unhealthily high degree of trust for the government.  In reality we should all be asking what the proper role of the state is.  That should be the most important political debate because is thrusts to the heart of the kind of society we want and the kind of freedoms we want and the kind of view we have of individual responsibility and of how life really functions and works.

Handing over all our responsibilities to the state is really just the illusion that someone else is going to take care of the problems.  Eventually we wake up to the fact that the people we trusted to get it all sorted didn’t have a clue how to do it and just basically dropped the ball.  What should we expect?  The government is nothing other than a bunch of fellow citizens earning their income by legislative fiat and with little to no incentive to steward the resources entrusted to them with any semblance of wisdom. As we said back in March,

“…while the state has mortgaged our future to pay for a party, Mr. and Mrs. Simms from 8 Dreary Lane in Dullsville have failed totally to plan for a rocky future.  A world full of trusting citizens has given the reins over to the state.  They entrusted their old age to the state, let the state make all the important decisions for them, and now realise the people driving the juggernaut were playing cards in the cockpit as it careered headlong toward disaster.”

So now we have RICA, and we trust our benevolent masters to steward responsibly the ability to intercept information.  But they won’t, and in the process we’ll be saddled with the hefty compliance costs, all in the name of NATIONAL SECURITY!

The basic premise for RICA is that the state needs the ability to catch criminals and therefore needs to monitor their communication.  Aside from the fact that the state is pretty good at manufacturing criminals via unnecessary rules and regulations that ordinary free people should not be expected to follow, what’s to stop the state using this rationale for justifying tapping every house and every building to ‘catch criminals’.  After all, aren’t crimes plotted behind closed doors and don’t criminals communicate in thousands of ways?  And what about when the term ‘criminal’ gets extended to mean opposition to state ideology?  This is really how classic, stock-standard, megalomaniacal dictatorships are made.

Many often quip that this kind of alarmism gets in the way of jolly sensible laws to keep us safe.  Keep us safe from whom?  Catching a few criminals, many doing crimes only insofar as the state said it was a crime, is hardly protection.  Instead we always end up with the ability of the government to extend the reach of its programmes.  Sound far fetched?  Sound a bit, 1984-ish to you?  Got Big Brother boredom on the brain right now?  Well just have a look at the UK, which has had a proliferation of CCTV cameras all over the island.  Most Britains are filmed every day.  Who needs a fictional Big Brother to whip up fear when you’ve got Theresa May at the Home Office armed with hundreds of thousands of cameras?

As technology evolves so the state has to scramble to make up Draconian laws to suppress the greater individual freedom these wonderful inventions create.

As with RICA, most governments cannot reasonably justify why they need to control the flow of information, and they often resort to the downright pathetic…

JGalt update: Talking about pathetic, consider the almighty and now nearly all-seeing government’s justifications for legislating the freedom thieving Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act.  Off Vodacom’s RICA portal:

Why must you register?

• RICA registration is a legislative requirement from the South African Government;
• All users of SIM cards are required to comply with this new law;
• This new legislation aims to help law enforcement agencies to track criminals using cellphones for illegal activities, thereby contributing to make South Africa safer for everyone.

So to recap with a rough translation of why must you register for RICA: 

1) Because the government says so. 
2) Because the government says so. 
3) Because you could be a criminal so the state must be able to track you.

But this ”criminal tracking” operation is the most ridiculous excuse given to coax the public into believing the nonsense. 

1. The cellphone industry will suffer lost profits in order to facilitate the implementation of the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act; 
2. It will inconvenience cellphone users by having to comply with bank-style FICA documentation to get their cellphone accounts Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act compliant; 
3. As taxpayers, we have the additional burden of supporting more government departments to regulate and control the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act, which means higher taxation, whether it is generated through higher personal income taxes, higher cellphone tariffs, or otherwise.

All of this to catch criminals - the legislated sort of criminal of course - while the biggest criminals out there are the ones that have their backsides protected by things like the Reserve Bank Act, while they are stealing wealth from the ignorant public every single day of the year by counterfeiting the public’s life savings. 

Either way, the cost of Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act far outweighs the benefits.  The most likely beneficiaries may be your aunt in law’s sister who got taken for her life savings by a Nigerian conster.  And to get her money back - unlikely in itself – we will all pay billions of Rands over to government.  Hardly any sort of return on investment. 

This kind of deal is an insurer’s dream: have your client pay a billion Rand premium, with the risk of paying out one thousand Rand in claims.  Economically this is what is happening to taxpayers with the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act. 

Anyways, we will leave you with some food for thought on the constition and the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act.  Shoot over to the South African constitution’s Bill of Rights, Chapter 2, Section 14, “Privacy,” and you will note the text:

“Everyone has the right to privacy, which includes the right not to have ­(d) the privacy of their communications infringed.”

Yet the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act states that:

“Subject to this Act, any  a)  authorised person who executes an interception direction or assists with the execution thereof, may intercept any communication; and”

Which takes us back to Animal Farm and its reduced one-liner commandment :

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”