Mbeki to sign ECT Bill tomorrow

Johannesburg, 30 Jul 2002

The Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Bill is to be signed by President Thabo Mbeki tomorrow, which in all likelihood will see its provisions coming into immediate effect.

Andile Ngcaba, director-general of the Department of Communications which initiated the legislation, said today it would be signed tomorrow in full and would not be altered, although a more public ceremonial signing is still in the works.

Unless a specific commencement date is added to the document, or some its provisions are specifically excluded, the entire document will become law immediately. This will then recognise the legal validity of digital signatures, create new "cyber crimes" and make it illegal to offer cryptography services without being registered with the government.

However, most of the provisions require regulatory and other control structures to be set up by government to regulate, and none of these are yet in place.

The bill`s rocky road to becoming law continued until the end, with a number of interest groups petitioning the President to either reject it entirely, reject it in part or split it into a number of parts.

One petition, on behalf of the Information Technology Lawyers` Forum, today counted 366 signatures after it was recently posted on the grassroots information site, ectbill.co.za.

UniForum, the non-profit organisation which administers the popular .co.za domain space, showed 2 972 responses to a poll it e-mailed to every individual with a .co.za domain name registered. More than 60% of respondents said they were "strongly opposed" to a chapter on the future of the South African domain name system, with another 25% saying they were "mostly opposed" to the specific section.

Critical response

Although many parts of the of the bumper legislation, which covers more than 100 pages over 14 chapters, drew criticism, none gained as much prominence as Chapter 10, which seeks to set up a domain name authority to take over control of the local .za top-level country domain. The current administrator, Mike Lawrie, was heavily opposed to government control of the domain and moved its primary zone file offshore in an attempt to prevent it from being seized.

Namespace, the organisation working with Lawrie to take over the domain, has been in continued discussions with government and is not overly gloomy at the prospect of the law coming into force. "There is no indication that [government] will do anything untoward or will do anything that will be abusive, even though the legislation allows for it," says chairman Mike Silber.

Namespace has been guaranteed a place in the body the law will establish to take over .za, and he hopes it can become a forum for the two sides to sort out their remaining differences. However, he does not exclude the possibility of a deadlock.

Even if the parties set their differences aside, Namespace will still push for amendments to the law, he says, to make sure future governments do not have the same opportunity for abuse.

Yet Namespace plans an annual general meeting in September where its plans could change. "If the membership turns around and says we should let it go we are obliged to let it go," Silber says.

Ryk Meiring, another Namespace board member, was also an initiator of the IT Lawyers` Forum petition, and is equally certain the legislation will change. "I have no doubt that there are going to be substantial amendments if it is passed in its current format," he says. "It will be required because a lot of the provisions are unlikely to achieve the legal effect they intend to achieve, and there may also be dramatic consequences not yet identified."

The Democratic Alliance, the official opposition, was the only political objector to the law and continues to believe it is open to change through more than negotiated amendments.

"If it is signed tomorrow [the President] has clearly ignored the petitions that have been sent around and objections from stakeholders in the industry, and shown a disregard for information we provided," says DA MP Vincent Gore. "That could open up interesting possibilities."

It is now up to the private sector to take the matter to the courts, specifically the Constitutional Court, he says, to challenge aspects such as "the blatantly unconstitutional critical databases" segment. This section allows government to prescribe standards for the management of private databases government deems to be important to the country.