Thirteen 37 Site of Stephen-John Rado

RICA act Unplugged

Well finally South Africa government has woken up that criminals weren’t born in the 1980s and can actual more than carrier pigeons to communicate with each other. So now that they want to control our communications they seemed to have employed a school child to think up their plans to do so in the shaped of a wonderful act called the RICA act.

The RICA act is thought to be similar to the FICA act, they both require a proof of address, and both are said to be in play to curb fraud and crime this is where their similarities end. FICA act is with your bank and the bank is an institution you generally build a relationship with over years, they lend you money extend your payments with and ultimately they come into your house one day (which they own too) and take your couch. RICA act is with your electronic communications, this includes cellphone, email and internet. These are people I pay for a general service, I don’t expect them to extend credit and I certainly don’t trust every small garage operation ISP with my personal details.

Next thing I don’t like and something everyone seems to be looking past is that with this act all these providers need to be tracking activity on your accounts, phone calls, emails, midnight sms to the girl friends will all be nicely stored and logged in a great big server for anyone with the legal permission or the tech know how to go off and check. Doesn’t this remind you of a place of stars and striped that lock of people after sending “anarchy cookbook” to his friends over an email, you were all up in arm over that! Also if you are storing sensitive information surly there should be a guild line or standard to keep to? Credit card companies make the banks jump through hoops before letting them store credit card numbers, same should be for our emails.

Now the another point is that no one told anyone what kind of standard to keep to so once you have all these logs how am I meant to store it so government or police systems can read it to get the information they want. For example do I separate call logs by spaces or commas? No one’s saying so I could just stick random numbers into a file and say that’s the way we stored it figure it out for yourself.

This just shows you how floored the act is, someone in a big room with no technical mind thought it would be a good idea and stuck his signature on a piece of paper to make it happen. Criminals don’t care they don’t follow the law anyway, like the gun licensing, you think if you ban guns people are going to stop shooting each other? NO! Criminals will just find a way. The black market in stolen phones and now sim cards will sky rocket, this is just fueling the industry and I haven’t even mentioned how it’s going to make a serious dent in tourist and rural people.

Come on get a clue and stop the madness the only people this is going to hurt is the corporate giants who make their money selling the accounts everyone