Fellow South African here, you'd be very surprised then with the capabilities of our spy agency. Very secretive by hugely funded. The former apartheid spies went on to consult for the current government, and they were all very highly trained. In fact one of the precursors to the mass surveillance tech made famous by Snowden, was actually developed at a firm in Stellenbosch in the late 90's to early 00's. That was then sold on to various other state intel agencies, of which SA got a cut of the profit.

We've been developing very high level intelligence tools for years in private/public partnerships. It's all just highly secretive, and one of the areas that really does work, so it doesn't get any attention. Most of us, like yourself, just assume that because other areas here are awful, that our intel community must be to, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Lastly don't forget JZ himself was Head of Intelligence, so he always held it in high regard, and gave it the funding it required.

Not so secretive, in recent history VASTech (based in Stellenbosch's Technopark) were known to be supplying Gadaffi's Libya with telephone surveillance tech. [0]

Didn't know about the precursor tech being developed in Stellenbosch as well, do you have any sources on that? I'd be interested to see who was involved.

Agreed on the intel community generally being in a grey area as far as the law is concerned, it's a struggle enough keeping them impartial and not meddling in domestic affairs - talking about JZ being head of the ANC's intelligence in exile brings back memories of his ultimate succession of Thabo Mbeki and former spy chief Billy Masetlha's role in that.

[0] https://mg.co.za/article/2011-09-02-sa-firm-helped-gaddafi-s...

if they don't have the expertise, someone else with the expertise interested in access to the data will help them.

Often at exorbitant cost in our case. The SSA is an unaccountable financial black hole. Our former president send to have also used them for his political gain, this Fraser chap is responsible for many misdeeds.

Now parts of our country are literally burning, yet there's no crime intelligence about the very threats to the state that SSA should be monitoring for. There was an act of terror that was nearly committed 2 days ago, but we're seeing poor leadership from those involved.

> There was an act of terror that was nearly committed 2 days ago

Please can you provide a link to more info on this?

There are protests by truck drivers and some of these actions can be seen as terrorism.

https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/news/kwazulu-natal/two-truck...

I don't think that is what they were alluding to. They said: "an act of terror that was _nearly_ committed"

Hasn't China been doing this all over Africa and South America?

Yup, in Africa China built and bugged (allegedly - China and the AU denied) the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/30/china-african-...

Not only China, there are more then enough western countries that export these technologies.

It's surprising to me at least because South Africa has a GDP per capita of $~6.1k, and perhaps can't afford access to that expertise.

Which I suppose suggests that they didn't pay for it, and another nation state 'helped out' via intermediaries.

GDP per capita isn't a great measurement for the capabilities of a state.

You're right, it's probably better to look at GDP overall, since that's basically the tax base theoretically.

1. Its not uniformlly distributed. 2. China has GDP/person of ~$9,600 3. South Africa merrilly mines 4km below ground 4. Previous efforts included a nuclear weapons programme 5. Whole parts of Amazon's infa a built in CT

Get out more.

Apologies, you seem to have taken this a bit more personally intended. All I was intending to suggest was that the SA gov budget would be somewhat constraining its ambitions, not that its people are technologically behind, or whatever else you seem to be implying here.

I strongly doubt they spliced the cables. From the article it sounds like they got a court order (probably unconstitutional), allowing them to intercept the data. So they probably just needed to install a couple of big servers at the landing sites.

You don't splice cables, you split the light with a prism and siphon of 10% of the light. All of it.

Every telco has locked rooms full of kit for this job.