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Thursday, 10 September 2009 11:04
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The Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Act. So the government wants to know who you are, where you are and what you are talking about at any given time. That is basically what it seems with regards to the up and coming RICA act. The intentions of the government are noble, bat at the end of the day the implementation of RICA is a farce. The act was supposed to come into play way back in 2006 but due to certain administrative issues, it was delayed. The CEO of Vodacom at the time, a Mr Alan Knott-Craig, asked as to how the implementation of this act was possible. The issue still remain, but they seem to have been swept under the rug. There are fifteen to twenty million South African who don’t have a home address. How is the current regime going to deal with the situation? In 2006 Parliament was appealed to and convinced that the implementation was simply not possible. And now three years later, the RICA beast has raised its head again.
The three big cellular operators are unable to agree on anything, but they announced in unison that the industry was ready for the implementation of RICA. The feel good and soft and fuzzy message about making South Africa safer has tried to make the whole matter trivial. The task is a huge one that has to be complied with in the next eighteen months. If a SIM card is not registered in eighteen months from date of implementation, the SIM will be deactivated. That sounds simple enough, but what about the SIM card that is purchased from Joe’s Spaza in rural Limpopo? Does Joe have the facilities to document and retain the documentation? How will the documentation be certified? How will the service provider get hold of the documentation? What about cell phones? Are SIM cards required to be linked to them? The act mentions the number of the cellular phone concerned. What number is this? Where will this be recorded? And then what about the actual registration? Are the providers ready? What if you don’t have a physical address? How will the address be verified? Can the police realistically be expected to deal with every lost SIM card? So you lose your SIM card, what then? Our law and enforcement department is already under extreme pressure to deal with current matters, are they prepared to deal with the sudden and continuous onslaught of lost SIM cards? According to the act, you are required to report the loss within a reasonable time to any police station. Can the penalties seriously be enforced? So you fail to report the loss. You are now guilty of a crime. You are now a criminal. You can be fined up to two million rand. There are countless privacy concerns too, where the Act allows a wide range of law enforcement agents, under a wide range of circumstances, to access archived information about calls as well as to listen in on calls. Will this work? No. There are very few answers at this point but don't forget, the industry "is ready". What we'll no doubt see is a number of "urgent submissions" made at the end of 2010 (when most of government is on leave), stating the networks' "problems" in registering nearly 45m SIM cards. Government can't exactly force the operators to cut off millions of informal residents who either don't know about the law or simply cannot register. There is nothing to suggest, from either the providers or from government, that the overriding difficulty of registering 15m to 20m South Africans who simply don't have a residential address has been solved. However the idiocy continues. For more information, please see MoneyWeb. Comments (1)
  written by AbortRetryFail, September 10, 2009
I have 2 contract phones/sims. I went through the whole schlep of proving I'm a real person with a real bank account with real money, have a real home etc so I've done all the registration stuff required YEARS ago when I got them. I havn't missed any payments ever so there's no reason to think I'm using it for neffarious purposes so why should I go and RE-register again?
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