It’s true. Big Brother is watching you. Although he’s doing so ostensibly in your interest, he’s doing so with neither benign intent nor benign consequences.

Privacy International’s report Track, Capture, Kill: Inside communications surveillance and counter-terrorism in Kenya was released this past week. It’s a shocking indictment of how, in particular, the National Intelligence Service is blithely ignoring constitutional protections. It’s also a shocking indictment of how telecommunications service providers are contributing to these constitutional breaches. For reasons of fear (of licence revocation) for failure to co-operate.
There are several implications to this report for us all.

First, our own perceptions of how intelligence-gathering is done must change. Those of us prone to surveillance — think here not just of would-be jihadis, but also of anybody critical of the state, like the political opposition and civil society — are no doubt used to the oddly lurking car, the participants at meetings who seem somewhat out of place, the approaches from “journalists” from obscure media houses. And have accustomed ourselves to the fact that some of those friendly, day-to-day encounters with cleaning staff, guards and so on are sometimes actually friendly, day-to-day encounters with trained intelligence gatherers.

But what this report tells us is that the NIS’s reliance on human intelligence (Humint) and related (creepy) social engineering techniques is becoming passé. That although, according to the report, the state’s capacities for mass surveillance through signals intelligence (Sigint) is still limited, targeted surveillance is now both highly evolved and highly systematised. Through, for example, the placement of Directorate of Criminal Intelligence staff in all telecommunications service providers.

Second, we learn of the division of labour that supposedly justifies the constitutional breaches while presenting a semblance of constitutional compliance. The NIS gets what it wants, when it wants, about whom it wants—all without the requisite warrant from the High Court. If what’s goes is deemed actionable, it’s handed over to the DCI, the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit or the General Service Unit’s reconnaissance team.

The DCI then, post-facto, retrospectively, obtains the High Court warrant to justify surveillance for criminal investigative purposes. The ATPU and the GSU-Recce, however, simply go to town in the ways they know how. Locate, track, remove. The report makes the point that, in this way, Sigint, unconstitutionally acquired, is at the heart of all the enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions Kenya’s counter-terrorism effort is known for.

Third, we learn of the companies and countries complicit in this. Beyond our own telecommunications service providers (the largest of which denied almost every claim in the report).

The Israeli companies Hacking Team and Verint. The increasingly ubiquitous FinFisher.
It’s all completely unacceptable.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes