{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Big Brother using wi-feye to spy on citizens? Ugandans are upset - Comment
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Big Brother using wi-feye to spy on citizens? Ugandans are upset
Imagine waking up in a cheap hotel in a tough neighbourhood in the morning and discovering that you never locked the door and it was open all night?
That is the feeling many Ugandans got last week after the BBC aired an investigative report to the effect that free Wi-Fi in Kampala could be worse than no Wi-Fi at all.
The report, which was picked by local and social media but vigorously denied by the government the following day, said that Uganda acquired sophisticated spyware to monitor people's communications.
It was like a mass Wikileaks. But this time instead of spooking a few elite types who had yapped too freely to American diplomats, almost everybody is affected. For it appears that the "free" Internet in several hotels in the city and Entebbe exposes all the users' data and passwords to the spies.
Opposition politicians, who the BBC report says were the targets of the technology acquired in 2011 to infiltrate and neutralise their Walk to Work protests, were understandably angry. But the rest of the people who on entering a hotel automatically ask for the Wi-Fi password were numbed by the report.
One commentator wrote that it was like being told you've been exposed to a deadly communicable disease so that you start going back in your memory trying to recall which "unprotected sites" you logged into.
That security situations create the need for the government to listen in on private conversations is not in dispute in Uganda. At the height of the Joseph Kony war over 10 years ago, President Museveni once praised his fierce opposition critic, Cecilia Ogwal, saying she was a principled person who had told off Kony in a phone conversation when he tried to solicit her support for his insurgency.
Mrs Ogwal was livid, vowing to sue the government for tapping her phone. But a presidential aide casually remarked that the president had only tapped Kony's phone and got to hear her response. Mrs Ogwal promptly abandoned her threats to sue.
So if the state is expected to listen to our phone conversations and hack into our electronic correspondence for the general good, why are people so alarmed? It must have something to do with the suspicion that not all security operatives observe the highest ethical standards.
If you doubt the integrity of security personnel, can you sleep soundly when you know they have access to all your mails and social media accounts?
Not too long ago, an officer was arrested for selling "tapes" recorded in one of the top security offices in Uganda. So if they can steal and sell their employer's secrets, would such officers hesitate to sell your secrets to your business rivals?
In a couple of other African countries, I have heard from diplomats that buying info from security officers is surprisingly cheap. So would you feel safe if you have made some confidential communication by mail, knowing that some guys whose integrity is less than a hundred per cent have access to it?
Maybe you are in the category of people who get asked by potential employers about certain candidates, and you respond truthfully. Imagine a guy making a copy of your response and showing it to the chap you said was talented but has some issues? Imagine this, imagine that, imagine… That is what the spyware report caused in people's minds.
Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for development journalism. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com
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