South Africa, UK Acknowledge Mass Surveillance By Tapping Undersea Internet Cables

The South African government has been conducting mass surveillance on all communications in the country, reports Reclaim the Net:, citing a report from Privacy International as well as recently-revealed affidavits and other documents from former State Security Agency (SSA) director-general Arthur Fraser:
Interestingly, the mass surveillance has been happening since 2008... The surveillance was supposedly designed to cover information about organized crime and acts of terrorism. It even involves surveillance on food security, water security, and even illegal financial flows.

The report also revealed that the South African government has done bulk interception of Internet traffic by way of tapping into fiber-optic cables under the sea. What is not clear though is whether the surveillance covers all Internet traffic or limited only to some of the fiber cables. The SSA said that the automated collection of data was specifically geared for foreign communications that pose threats to state security only. However, even the SSA admits to the fact that it will require human intervention to determine whether any communications that pass through the fiber cables are foreign or not. Hence, it would be difficult to distinguish between foreign and local communications.

The iAfrikan site interviewed a digital rights researcher at South Africa's amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, whose legal filings helped bring this information to light. "We had details of the state's mass surveillance activities at least as early as 2006...." he tells the site, adding later that "The government has been quite upfront that it's collecting data from a vast number of people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing... Essentially, the State Security Agency is collecting as much haystack as it can, just in case it needs to look for a needle."

Privacy International reports that the U.K. government has also recently acknowledged their "bulk interception of internet traffic by tapping undersea fibre optic cables." The site describes the work of the two countries as "some of the most pervasive surveillance programmes in human history."