Cyber Bill “Deeply Problematic” – ACA’s Laura Miti

The PF Government is attempting to resurrect the Cyber Security and Cyber Crimes Bill. Coming just six months before elections the move has sparked suspicion that it may be used to target the government's critics ahead of the upcoming polls.

Civil society groups have also raised several concerns regarding the Bill, including the lack of consultation and the fact that it falls short of several regional and international set standards on human rights aligned laws, including those which Zambia has adopted.

Last week a press statement issued by groups including the Chapter One Foundation, ActionAid, ACA, Caritas, Centre for Trade Policy and Development, CCZ, GEARS, TI-Z. Peoples’ Action for Accountability and Good Governance in Zambia and the Zambia Council for Social Development set out their concerns on the matter.

Alliance for Community Action (ACA) Executive Director is among those to take issue with the contents of the Bill. Having read the proposed legislation in its entirety Miti has summarised it as follows:

“1. It is a deeply problematic bill that would fundamentally infringe on citizen rights to express themselves and to privacy.

2. The Bill’s evil is in its intention to prejudicially punish citizens via harassment, searches, surveillance, and seizures of data and information on the accusation of very indefinite crimes for which they could very probably be acquitted.

3. Government's claim that the Bill is primarily meant to protect children against sexual exploitation and citizens from cyberbullying, is patently untrue.

4. That the government is being untruthful about the objectives of the Bill, is seen in that a total of only 7, out of the 90 sections in the Bill, address child pornography, pornography, cyberbullying or terrorism. The rest give the state power to access citizen communication via searches and inordinate levels of surveillance.

6. The Minister can declare ANY PERSON a law enforcement officer for purposes of this proposed law. By this provision, the Minister could give authority to a party cadre or a foreign agent to search premises to investigate a possible crime that is not detailed in the Act.

7. The Bill, if passed, will invalidate confidentiality clauses that staff sign. For example, a staff member of an organisation under investigation can reveal confidential information with no consequences. Similarly, a journalist can reveal a source or details of an investigative story and the employer be prevented from punishing them.

8. Number 7 can allow the state to insert a mole (spy) in an organisation who can then reveal information without fear of confidentiality clauses in their employment contract.

9. Service providers will be required to intercept communication and send it to the state. To do so, they MUST acquire sophisticated equipment at their own cost.

10. Property, including, buildings, can be forfeited to the state on conviction of a crime set out in the Bill, small or large.

11. The state can cooperate with rogue foreign states to investigate and harass citizens.

12. The Act will apply to communication done in other countries. Zambians living abroad can, therefore, be arrested on their return for something they posted while in another country.

13. Anyone can make an accusation that communication is a security threat, and a crime is about to be committed and therefore instigate a full-scale investigation whose parameters are shockingly extensive.

14. In the process of a search, law enforcement officers can bodily search anyone found on the premises. (The Bill is kind enough to say the search can only be conducted by someone of the same sex.)

12. Most frightening of all is Section 89, which is the killer punch and I will quote it in full:

The Authority may, by declaration, exempt a person or class of persons for a limited or unlimited period of time from the requirement to abide by the provisions of this Act.

13. By this one section (89,) all provisions of the Bill are strangely negated. Most significantly, section 89 provides that all protections of citizen rights in the Bill, minimal as they already are, can be set aside by a declaration (whose form the Bill does not define) made by the Minister. Thus, for example, anyone the Minister dresses up as a law enforcement officer can legally raid a home or organisation and seize information and property, without a judge hearing the premise of that investigation.”

“That is the summary of yet another offering in this government’s ongoing attempt to legislate dictatorship into being. The question, as ever, is why? What ill is the government trying to remedy by such a draconian Bill? The only explanation I see is that the Bill's primary objective is to harass and, thereby, silence critics of the government, as the President announced in Parliament,” Miti concludes.