MADLANGA J
notification in that subsection be withheld for a period
which shall not exceed 90 days at a time or two years in
aggregate.
9.
The Minister of Police and the Minister of State Security must pay the
applicants’ costs in this Court, including the costs of two counsel.
JUDGMENT
MADLANGA J (Khampepe J, Majiedt J, Mathopo AJ, Mhlantla J, Theron J,
Tshiqi J and Victor AJ concurring):
Introduction
[1]
The Constitution proclaims that “[n]ational security must reflect the resolve of
South Africans, as individuals and as a nation, to live as equals, to live in peace and
harmony, to be free from fear and want and to seek a better life”.1 It does so against a
historical backdrop in which the pursuit of a skewed notion of national security was
weaponised and calculated to subvert the dignity of the majority of South Africans.2 As
part of this pursuit, law enforcement involved searches of people, their homes, and their
belongings. Over the years, law enforcement evolved to include the surveillance of
people, their homes, their movements, and their communications.3 Today technology
1
Section 198(a) of the Constitution.
2
Skewed because it was securing South Africa to prop up the apartheid government and thus guarantee white
privilege and all that that government stood for.
I use “surveillance” not to relate only to the interception by state functionaries in terms of the Regulation of
Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act 70 of 2002 of
real-time communications of individuals (whether made face to face or “indirectly”, i.e. in the sense that the
people communicating were not in each other’s presence), but to also include all access by these functionaries in
terms of RICA to material related to communications. By the latter I am referring to, for example, information
about the location at which a call was (or is being) made or a text was (or is being) sent or received and by what
devices; if the communication-related information is more than 90 days old, it is called “archived
communication-related information” (see the definition in section 1) and if it concerns communications that are
3
6