The Right to Privacy v National Security in Africa: Towards a Legislative Framework Which Guarantees Proportionality in Communications Surveillance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Governments often resort to communications surveillance in order to combat threats against national security. Communication surveillance infringes upon the right to privacy. In order to protect privacy, international law requires communication surveillance to be proportionate. However, very little has been written to justify why this right deserves such protection in Africa, given counter-arguments suggesting that where national security is threatened, the state must be permitted to do everything possible to avert the threat, and the protection of privacy is an inconvenience. This article addresses these counter-arguments by demonstrating that the right to privacy deserves protection because it is as important as defending national security. It analyses approaches taken by selected African countries to regulate authorisation of communication surveillance. This article questions the assumption that prior judicial authorisation is the ideal approach to regulating communication surveillance in order to guarantee proportionality, and it suggests a need to consider other alternatives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".