Robert Shaka edged his modest white sedan through the dark alleyway. He had switched off his car headlights and scanned the scene as he crept away from his home in Kampala and towards his office. Shaka sensed something was wrong as soon as he hit the main road. A sports van was parked in the shadows near some bushes; the faint light from a security compound revealed the silhouettes of seven men inside, along with the outlines of their Kalashnikovs. He had to move quickly.
It was a Monday morning in June 2015, and Shaka, a middle-aged father of three, who worked in IT at the US embassy in Kampala, knew that his movements were being monitored: in February 2015 he had been charged with "issuing offensive communication" - a vaguely worded violation listed in the Computer Misuse Act that's used by the Ugandan authorities to intimidate internet users - and placed on police bond.
Shaka was charged with being Tom Voltaire Okwalinga, the name given to an anonymous Facebook profile more commonly known by Ugandans as TVO, a widely-read government dissenter. The charge sheet accused him of "disguising as Tom Voltaire Okwalinga" between 2011 and 2015 and "wilfully and repeatedly using a computer, with no purpose of legitimate communication, disturbing the right of privacy of H.E. [His Excellency] Yoweri Kaguta Museveni by posting statements as regards his health condition on social media, to wit, Facebook."
Shaka, along with other government critics, had been accused of being TVO as early as 2013. He dismissed the allegations and initially didn't take the police too seriously. Shaka's official online pseudonym is Maverick Blutaski, a careful government critic with a more modest following and ambition than TVO.
In August 2015, two months after Shaka appeared in court, he received a strange typewritten letter that he says was given to him by a security officer at his workplace late one Friday night, when no one else was around. It read: "An unspecified Ugandan official has threatened your life in relation to your suspected political activities".
Below this message was a yellow handwritten note reading: "Please pass to Robert Shaka".
When WIRED interviews Shaka in two long sessions over Skype, he sits in his neat, grey-walled bedroom. (He has asked us not to disclose his location.) He has curly hair and a thick moustache and recounts the story of his arrest in a long-winded fashion with a husky, rolling voice and emphatic hand gestures. The government still does not know his whereabouts, he says. He is due to make a court appearance in a matter of days and is concerned about the safety of those who are his sureties.
The IT specialist seems an unlikely online hero. A quiet, middle-class father of two young boys and a baby girl, Robert Shaka is a man who can stay indoors for days on end reading, playing games on his PlayStation and watching news and political debates on television. Having been a diligent worker for the US embassy for 15 years, he is anything but revolutionary and far from a radical figure. He supports equality, liberty and freedom of expression.
Shaka has a big personality and a theatrical manner, and pays close attention to intricate details when he tells a story. But he can also come across as a quiet guy who got caught up in a paranoid government's obsession with a controversial online character. Shaka never imagined that his arrest would become symbolic of how repressive states throughout the region are clamping down on freedom of expression online.
Ugandan journalists liken TVO to Edward Snowden, whereas Shaka sees the former CIA contractor in more basic terms - an employee who betrayed the trust of his employer, rather than a patriot fighting for the freedom and ideals of his home nation. He sees TVO in a very different way: a legendary firebrand who can "break news, break secrets and publish anything that he can land on," in a pseudo dictatorship whose western allies have ignored the depredations of its leader because he is an ally in the so-called war on terror in Africa.
The evidence against Shaka is yet to be presented in court, but many theories about TVO have been posed: that he is a government insider or a composite group of activists with high-profile sources rather than an individual, for one. This is the case with Baba Jukwa, a blogger well known in Zimbabwe, who is said to be the work of a group of defectors from Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party. Individuals have been arrested in the hunt for Baba Jukwa but, like Tom Voltaire, the blog has continued. WIRED asks Shaka whether he is TVO.
"I'm not TVO." A long, solemn pause. "I'm not TVO."
Uganda's most bombastic and audacious Facebook personality is followed by more than 80,000 citizens, politicians, members of the media and the diaspora. Drawing on the irreverence of Voltaire, the 18th-century French philosopher known for his acerbic attacks on the establishment, TVO leaks state secrets, breaks corruption scandals and airs wild rumours in a distinctly Ugandan way: he's brash, vulgar, no-holds-barred and very funny.
He openly attacks and mocks the Ugandan political elite and calls for revolution, and the overthrow of Museveni, a former rebel leader and military strongman who has been Uganda's commander in chief for 30 years, and who recently extended his mandate in widely disputed national elections held in February 2016.
TVO is unabashedly pro-opposition. He writes in capitals, airs secret recordings, unveils political plots and posts mocking, home-made memes of the nation's most powerful officials. News teams trawl the page for leads as it breaks stories before the mainstream media and laugh when it routinely humiliates government spokespeople.
The state has already arrested other people for being TVO, but has released them all due to lack of evidence. According to Charles Bichachi, managing editor of Uganda's leading daily newspaper, the Daily Monitor, the fate of the person behind TVO will be grim. "He will be dead," he tells WIRED. "I don't think he would survive even for one day because he has stepped on a lot of toes."
Use of the internet has skyrocketed in Africa, particularly in eastern and southern regions. In Uganda, internet penetration has increased fourfold in the past five years, growing from 7.9 per cent to 37.4 per cent - and it is expected to reach at least 50 per cent in the coming years.
The widespread availability of the internet, the low price of data and cheap Chinese devices flooding the market has made social media suddenly widely accessible. This growth hasn't always been greeted with enthusiasm by some governments. Countries including Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda continue to assert control over the burgeoning virtual space and silence online dissidents. Weasel-worded laws and "computer misuse" acts define offences in broad strokes, as does interception of communications legislation.
Governments say these laws have been drafted to fight terrorism, cybercrime, child pornography and encouragement of genocide and political violence. But many of the laws are vague, contain loopholes and have little judicial or independent oversight, giving governments the power to stifle freedom of expression, spy on opponents, arrest pundits and oblige ISPs to block sites and shut down social channels.
The State of Internet Freedom in East Africa 2015 report, released in September 2015 and sponsored by the Collaboration of International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa, found a pattern of laws being passed that "threaten the right to freedom of expression, both online and offline." It cited a "rise in abuses and attacks on internet freedom".
Whereas real-world physical abuses remain the focus for human rights defenders, there is a growing legal and moral recognition within institutions such as the United Nations regarding the right to privacy and freedom of expression and assembly online. In 2015, the UN appointed Joseph Cannataci as its first special rapporteur on the right to privacy. Activists point to a growing consensus that censorship and abuses online are often linked to broader attacks on human rights and civil liberties.
WIRED meets Shaka's lawyer Nicholas Opiyo, a stern young man who answers in complete sentences as if he is in a courtroom speaking to a clerk. He says he took on Shaka's case because the team saw it as a "watershed, trend-setting case for free expression on social media", one that violates the constitutional right to freedom of expression.
"On every occasion they have refused to give us the basis of their case," he says.
In Uganda, the crackdown of online dissidents comes off the back of new legislation restricting freedom of expression and assembly. The Non-governmental Organisations bill passed in 2015, allows the government to shut down organisations that engage in acts "prejudicial to the interests of Uganda and the dignity of the people of Uganda". The Public Order Management Act, passed in 2013, requires that Ugandans who gather in groups of more than three to discuss politics seek permission from the government.
Uganda's presidential elections in February 2016 sharply illustrated this. The government tightly controlled and shut down public gatherings. Soldiers were camped out around Constitution Square in the capital city of Kampala, where locals have gathered and voiced dissent for decades. Now the square is typically empty, a short distance away sits Independence Monument, a lonely sculpture of a man raising his arms to the sky in an empty patch of concrete. Uganda's leading opposition candidate Kizza Besigye was denied access to parts of the city and was arrested before the inauguration, and his supporters are routinely arrested and tear-gassed.
For online activists, the internet is a refuge from the repressive realities of the Ugandan political sphere. But the region's governments are increasingly buying surveillance tech that's used without adequate legal oversight. Reporters and civil society experts have called into question the ethics and legality of the invasive technology of companies such as the UK- and Germany-based Gamma International that sells software called FinFisher, and Milan-based Hacking Team, which sells what it describes as "offensive security". Both companies have been investigated for selling their products to repressive governments - Uganda and Ethiopia to name but two.
Hacking Team's products can mine and export all data on devices and gain access to webcams and cameras to conduct real-time surveillance. Once it is installed on a hard drive the software is difficult to detect. In April 2016, the Italian government revoked Hacking Team's export licence to sell its technology outside of the EU following the disclosure that the company was selling to Egypt's president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's government and other authoritarian regimes.
This coincided with a rise in tensions between the two countries when, two months earlier, Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni was found dead on the outskirts of Cairo. His body showed signs of extreme torture and Egypt's security services were suspected to be involved.
Spyware has long been used by regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, and is now gaining ground in sub-Saharan Africa. An investigation by human rights NGO Privacy International was sparked by allegations that the Ugandan government was using FinFisher malware.
According to the group's report, For God and My President: State Surveillance in Uganda, the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence and the Uganda Police Force "acting on presidential orders, used an intrusion malware, short for malicious software, to infect the communications devices of key opposition leaders, media and establishment insiders," in an operation known as "Fungua Macho" - "open your eyes" in Swahili - following a disputed election in 2011. Researchers also claimed that the government issued bribes to get access to the phones and computers of key members of the opposition and created fake hotspots to ensnare others.
The Ugandan government denies the allegations, and has threatened to sue the BBC for publishing an article on the findings. However, in a letter to Privacy International, Gamma refused to either confirm nor deny that it had sold malware to Uganda, adding that it "does not supply in contravention of UN sanctions" nor did it encourage "misuse" of its product. The statement also stressed that its product had been effective against drug cartels, organised crime and paedophile rings.
Invasive software that is difficult to trace - like that provided by Hacking Team - can be used to target dissidents beyond national borders. Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, an organisation that focuses on the relationship between technology, human rights and global security, uncovered the first known case of an African country attempting to access digital accounts across continents.
According to Marczak, the Ethiopian government made three attempts to target the Skype and email accounts of exiled journalists and human-rights activists at a Virginia-based television station, ESAT. Unlike most African countries, Ethiopia has a monopoly over the telecommunications network and can easily tap lines and monitor calls - which could prove fatal for on-the-ground sources.
Shaka became suspicious about his arrest and the fact that he had to report to the Criminal Investigations Division for more than six months, but he kept quiet, hoping that it would go away. But, after a tip-off from an old school friend that a senior member of the military intelligence unit was trying to track down Shaka's address, Opiyo advised his client to go public to protect himself.
The evening before Shaka's arrest, broadcaster NTV Uganda aired an interview with him in which he denied being TVO and called on the government to stop cracking down on its online critics. Shaka expected a backlash, but not to be ambushed outside his house early one morning.
When that happened, he acted decisively. He turned right and sped off to a petrol station down the road. He pulled up by a petrol pump, got out of his car and folded his arms across his chest to make sure his hands were visible. Police officers dressed in plain clothes and armed with AK47s informed Shaka that they would be taking him to the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). The police searched his car and found his mobile phone.
As the officers milled about, Shaka took a second phone from the inside pocket of his brown suede blazer and sent an SMS to his brother, a work colleague, a friend in London and a friend in Washington: "They have taken me to SIU. Please come and rescue me. Inform others."
At SIU he was escorted into a large hall full of prisoners, many of whom Shaka says had been detained without charge: defectors from the Rwandan army; terror suspects; people accused of violent offences. The grey cell blocks had mats on the ground instead of beds. The prisoners felt a sense of fatalism - many were held without the knowledge of their family members and some said they had been tortured.
Shaka says that one man in his late thirties who was accused of stealing scrap metal from his boss limped into the cells weeping after what he said was a thrashing with a metal bar that left bruises all over his body. Shaka was afraid, but unlike the other inmates his family, lawyer and the US embassy at least knew where he was.
Within a few hours, news of Shaka's arrest broke, not on mainstream media, but on the Tom Voltaire Okwalinga Facebook page. "You must release Robert Shaka with immediate effect...He is not even TVO...I advise you to continue looking for TVO until you grow grey hair, and by that time it will be TVO looking for you," read the post. At the time of writing, the case has been under way for a year, but the state has yet to make public the evidence against Shaka.
Joseph Owino, a young web developer who has helped officials set up Twitter accounts, says he doubts the government has any evidence against Shaka and whether it has the capacity to unmask TVO. The government has written to Facebook requesting the identity of Tom Voltaire Okwalinga. It denied the request. Owino himself was arrested in October 2014 and detained at SIU after being accused of hacking the president's Twitter account. He spent the night in jail and was released without charge.
"I see more effort to muzzle people's voices," says Owino, who adds that messaging apps and social media are spreading beyond the Kampala middle class and elite. He believes the government's capacity to conduct surveillance is limited, but he is still concerned by its appetite to monitor online activity.
During the elections, the inspector general of police, Kale Kayihura, ordered the Ugandan Communications Commission to shut down social media, citing undisclosed security threats, by using "black holing", a technique whereby traffic is directed away from the IP addresses of specified platforms. To get round this, many Ugandans downloaded virtual private networks to bypass the system. Opposition party the Forum for Democratic Change was able to release its own tally of votes even as its headquarters was tear-gassed and blocked by police, and its leader Kizza-Besigye was under house arrest.
During the 2011 elections, the Ugandan government ordered mobile-phone networks to intercept text messages containing words associated with the Arab spring, such as "Egypt," "Tunisia," "Mubarak" and "people power". The same year, it also ordered the shutdown of social media during the Walk to Work demonstrations, orchestrated by the opposition after security forces killed nine bystanders. Back then, many of the internet and mobile service providers ignored the government's request. In 2016, they complied.
James Saaka heads Uganda's National Information Technology Authority, part of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology. He tells WIRED about the Ugandan government's plan to build an IT park that would create thousands of jobs. Coverage of the court case contesting the election results flashes across a TV in the corner of his office. WIRED steers the conversation towards the social-media blackout. "Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I should abuse you," he says. "We can have different views but put them in a proper way."
The division that investigated Shaka's case is Uganda's Media Crimes Department, part of the Criminal Investigations Directorate. The agency is led by Simon Kuteesa - an amiable man in his fifties and a former state prosecutor who laughs like a jester. When asked to define what "offensive communication" is, he reads from his smartphone in a playful sing-song tone, that "it is illegitimate communication over a phone, computer or other electronic device that undermines a person's right to privacy and also causes annoyance".
When WIRED asks for a more detailed explanation, the response is evasive and ambiguous. "Offensive communication" appears to have no distinct definition; it's whatever the authorities decide it is.
Robert Alai is an online pundit in Kenya with 481,000 Twitter followers. He has been arrested more than 15 times in response to comments he has made on radio, blogs and social media. Alai is in many ways an unmasked Tom Voltaire Okwalinga: he says outrageous things online and sometimes his leaks are spot on. He was charged with "undermining the authority of a public officer" for calling President Uhuru Kenyatta an "adolescent president" in a tweet on December 13, 2015. Kenya must hold elections before August 2017 and Alai is concerned that activists will have to leave the country. "If I see the president or a policeman doing something wrong, am I going to be charged with undermining?" he asks.
"Alai is a necessary voice: we may not agree with what he says, but he has a right to say it," says Boniface Mwangi, a photographer and human rights activist as he sits in his office in PAWA254. A collective of artists, film-makers and photographers in Nairobi, it works for social change. "Every society needs an Alai."
But Mwangi, who photographed Kenya's post-election ethnic violence in 2007-2008, is fearful that the government will try to censor and shut down social media in the lead up to next year's elections. His belief is that Kenyans, Africa's most tech-savvy and politically engaged online community, won't let a social-media blackout happen without a fight.
As internet penetration continues to grow and social platforms become more integrated in the lives of Kenyans, so too does online surveillance. In 2013, Citizen Lab found three BlueCoat PacketShaper installations - software that monitors users' interactions on services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Mail and Skype - in countries including Kenya, Afghanistan, Bahrain, China, Kenya, Malaysia, Qatar and Russia. Publicly available information on surveillance in Kenya is scarce. The rise in terrorism since 2011 means that security is a subject officials don't want to discuss on the record.
In March, WIRED met Joseph Mucheru, the minister for information communications who used to work for Google in Kenya, at a Nairobi hotel. "We've had a lot of issues with terrorism and there are sensitivities in what we do," he says. "I don't want to comment about what we are doing with security."
When asked about the government's capacity to conduct online surveillance, he replied: "We are sufficiently covered." He refused to elaborate.
Like many Ugandans who have only known one president for 30 years, Robert Shaka posts on Facebook about government repression and the need for change. For him, the internet is a means by which citizens can fight back. He says the government's tactics will lead to more online critics setting up anonymous profiles. But online dissidents can still be silenced if the government develops greater online surveillance capabilities.
"More people are coming online," he says. "The government is feeling it because it cannot win the propaganda war on social media, that's why they want to shut it down."
He's optimistic, though, that online African dissidents will win the battle. "It may not be in the next five years, but the conversation is so rich, so pertinent, and nobody wants to walk away from it."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
