Why it will be illegal to lose your SIM

Information may or may not want to be free, but it certainly doesn`t allow itself to be controlled easily. People, on the other hand, most definitely want to be free and the vast majority want information to be free (of charge). Unfortunately these two things are increasingly becoming mutually exclusive, much like freedom and safety.

Information is difficult to secure; every move to tie it down leaves at least one loophole.

Phillip de Wet, journalist, ITWeb

I`m not talking about travel restrictions imposed because America managed to seriously annoy a significant percentage of the planet, or about Japanese activists decrying their new national ID system as oppressive. As usual, information technology is in the vanguard and the tightening of the noose has been obvious for some time.

Locally the Interception and Monitoring Bill has occasionally managed to raise a half-hearted shrug from some of our remarkably apathetic South Africans.

The charmingly named I&M Bill (so reminiscent of our favourite brand of fish) should have our support. It is focused on making the world a better place by allowing the police to monitor the activities of organised criminals, violent criminals and, potentially, terrorists. In fact, it goes to some length to ensure that no other people have their telephone conversations or e-mail intercepted.

The problem is that modern communications technology does not easily lend itself to monitoring. The very convenience that has made cellphones nearly ubiquitous makes them perfect for anyone who has something to hide. And that is where the Bill pulls its Jekyll-and-Hyde trick and become draconian, limiting and downright rude.

To monitor a telephone conversation it is obviously required to know which telephone to tap. It is all good and well to convince a court that listening in on what a drug kingpin has to say is necessary, but difficult if you don`t know his telephone number. Or if he switches phone accounts like he changes socks.

To solve this problem, the government wants to make it illegal for anyone to sell a SIM-card (the cellular hardware equivalent of a telephone account) to anyone else without keeping stringent records. So far so good; a bit of a drag on the cellular industry, but nothing we could not live with.

But what if our hypothetical kingpin has one of his henchmen buy his SIM cards for him? Or if some entrepreneur sets up a Web site that allows you to swap prepaid SIM cards with likeminded people all across the country? Six or seven swaps down the line nobody is going to link a number to an individual, that`s for sure.

You could make it illegal for anyone to hand over a SIM card for use by anyone else. This is also known as expropriation of rights, because that restricts the legal use of property. Even then our SIM-swappers could simply say their cards had been lost or stolen, which brings us to the Twilight Zone situation where it is a criminal offence to lose your SIM or have it stolen. Potentially, of course - the Bill is not yet law.

The cycle is classic and has been described in highbrow academic papers. Information is difficult to secure; every move to tie it down leaves at least one loophole. Eventually you have a metaphorical landscape littered with razor wire and landmines before somebody notices that all the pretty flowers have been trampled.

As one group pointed out with regards to the I&M Bill, making the ability to monitor conversations a primary purpose of a telecommunications system makes it less efficient in its actual purpose and a lot less convenient. Never mind the loss of privacy and basic freedom it brings.

The same is true of many other areas. What on earth is digital rights management supposed to be? If you call it by its true name, content control, you get a sense of what media companies are trying to do. They are desperate to remove and reduce the rights consumers have over digital content in an attempt to eliminate piracy that is bound to fail anyway. Fair use be damned, we are talking about profits here.

In that large corporations and governments agree: there are imperatives that override the rights of the common man. When it comes to nailing car-hijacking syndicates to a wall we may agree. Are we equally happy when it comes down to protecting the Disney bottom line, or someday, suppressing political dissent in SA?