R2K KZN to protest RICA at Vodacom Offices

On Monday 30 April 2018, Right2Know KZN will stage a protest outside the Umhlanga offices of Vodacom, to deliver a memorandum demanding an end to RICA spying abuses and calling for data costs to be slashed.

Our demands:

• SIM card registration must be scrapped!
• The RICA law must be challenged! These companies have stayed silent in the face of growing evidence that the state is abusing its surveillance powers. Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Telkom must stand up for their users’ privacy!
• Cell phone companies must protect our personal information and refrain from selling our information on to third parties.
• We still demand that #DataMustFall. Airtime costs should also be cut and SMSes should be made free.

This is the first step in a new phase of the campaign, which will target all network operators, as well as government. RICA is a law that has enabled government and the private sector to spy on ordinary citizens and collect our sensitive private communications. We are told this law is needed to fight crime, but crime remains high. Instead it is journalists, activists and whistleblowers who are spied on. And because of RICA SIM card registration, ordinary people’s information is readily available for identity theft and other abuses.

At the same time millions of ordinary citizens are being denied their right to communication through rip-off prices of airtime and data. Through RICA, companies like Vodacom and MTN have not only put citizens at further risk crimes via their readily available information but have also subjected us to abusively high data costs with no consideration of the socio-economic repercussions of this for the people.

Our message is: Free Our Phones! Free them from spying and privacy abuses; free them from high data costs and airtime rip-offs.

We invite media and supporters to join us. We will convene at Vodacom headquarters, Richefond Circle, Ridgeside Park at 11am on Monday 30 April 2018.

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Note: For more information on what’s wrong with RICA, see R2K’s publication: Stop The Surveillance- an activist guide to RICA and state surveillance in South Africa: r2k.org.za/rica-guide