Where Your Car License Plate Is a Spy: Daily Brief

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November 14, 2023
By Andrew Stroehlein
Contact me at DailyBriefTeam@hrw.org and Twitter @astroehlein.

In today's Daily Brief:

Mass Surveillance on Uganda’s Roads
An Injustice Reversed in the Philippines
Burkina Faso’s Tool for Punishment
Take Note: Other Key Stories
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Where Your Car License Plate Is a Spy

Lire la version en français / Lea la versión en español

This is a story about license plates on cars, or “number plates” as some folks around the world call them.

You’re probably thinking: seriously? License plates? Where’s the human rights angle?

In Uganda, a new surveillance system using high-tech license plates will allow the government to track all vehicles in the country every minute of the day.

The new effort, which the government launched November 1, is called the “Intelligent Transport Monitoring System.” That sound you hear is your Orwell alarm going off – and rightly so.

To the country’s existing traffic surveillance, this new system will add an additional network of cameras, facial recognition, and mandatory tracking devices on all vehicles.

That’s where the license plates come in. All new plates include a sim-card-equipped widget provided by the state-owned company, Uganda Telecommunications Corporation Ltd.

Through these special plates, police at the national command center will be able to track the location of all registered vehicles in real time. Foreign vehicles temporarily in Uganda will also be required to install the tracking devices while in the country.

The government has not allowed much public scrutiny of this new technical system and its capabilities, nor of their contract with the Russian company that will deliver the project and help run it for the first ten years – the generically named “Joint Stock Company Global Security.”

My expert colleague, Oryem Nyeko, has called out this unchecked mass surveillance, highlighting how it is, “undermining the right to privacy for millions of Ugandans.”

Adding financial insult to fundamental rights injury, the government will make vehicle owners pay for the privilege of being spied on. Registering the new plates will cost you between 50,000 and 714,300 Ugandan shillings (about US$13 to US$190). That’s no small amount of money in a country where half of adults earn less than 150,000 shillings (US$39) a month.

The whole thing is a terrible idea from start to finish. The government should scrap the system – and let license plates be boring again.

An Injustice Reversed in the Philippines

There’s good news from the Philippines with the release of unjustly accused Senator Leila de Lima after she spent nearly seven years behind bars.

Regular Daily Brief readers will recall we looked at her incredible case before, noting how, even after de Lima had been acquitted of most of the politically motivated charges brought against her, a court denied her bail repeatedly.

The former president of the country, Rodrigo Duterte, had directed de Lima’s persecution in response to her attempts to investigate Duterte’s killing spree by security forces. These thousands of killings – which Duterte called a “war on drugs” – amount to crimes against humanity, and de Lima had been a long-time critic of Duterte’s slaughter.

Three bogus, drug-related charges were brought against her. She was acquitted in the first case in 2021, and in June of this year, she was acquitted in the second case. Yet, despite the clearly political nature of these cases, the courts keep denying de Lima bail.

She was in “pretrial detention” from early 2017 to yesterday, when she was finally released on bail pending a decision on the last of the three ridiculous charges.

It should never have taken this long.

Burkina Faso’s Tool for Punishment

(written by Lisa Maier)

Burkina Faso’s military junta is using recently enacted emergency legislation to silence peaceful dissent and punish critics.

Earlier this month, security forces notified at least a dozen journalists, civil society activists, and opposition party members that they will be conscripted to participate in government security operations across the country.

The transitional military authorities say the orders are authorized under the April 13 “general mobilization,” part of a plan to recapture territory lost to Islamist armed groups, which control roughly half the country.

The plan also gives the president extensive powers to combat insurgency.

Since it took power in an October 2022 coup, the military junta has increasingly cracked down on the media and peaceful dissent, shrinking Burkina Faso’s civic space.

By targeting individuals who have openly criticized the junta, these conscription orders violate fundamental human rights.

The Burkinabe government should immediately end this misuse and abuse of conscription.