(25) The 2018 report by Right to Know on Surveillance of Journalists in South Africa details about 12 cases of surveillance, interception of communications and illegal accessing of call records by private investigators and the State. This has been conducted through the criminal intelligence system, which carried out surveillance on journalists that were working on various cases, including those on public corruption. (26) More recently, in March 2021, investigative journalist Jeff Wick was reported to be under illegal surveillance and his communication was intercepted by the police’s crime intelligence in their attempt to determine his sources behind the News24 coverage of issues happening within police management. (27) Of note, however, was the landmark ruling by the South African Constitutional Court in a case involving the AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism and Sam Sole, a journalist, whose communication was being monitored and intercepted, against the Minister of Justice and Correctional Services and others. In this case, the court declared that the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act (2021), RICA is unconstitutional on the basis that it fails to: (a) provide for safeguards to ensure that a judge designated for purposes of a warrant of interception is sufficiently independent; (b) provide for notifying the subject of surveillance of the fact of her or his surveillance as soon as notification can be given without jeopardising the purpose of surveillance after surveillance has been terminated; (c) adequately provide Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa CREDIT: NewsDay safeguards to address the fact that interception directions are sought and obtained ex parte; (d) adequately prescribe procedures to ensure that data obtained pursuant to the interception of communications is managed lawfully and not used or interfered with unlawfully, including prescribing procedures to be followed for examining, copying, sharing, sorting through, using, storing or destroying the data; and (e) providing adequate safeguards where the subject of surveillance is a practising lawyer or journalist. This judgment protects journalists and their sources from surveillance abuses and also confirmed that bulk or mass interception of ordinary citizens’ data and communication is illegal. (28) This was a win for media practitioners in South Africa and highlighted the need to push for the repeal and or amendment of the Act. Zimbabwe In Zimbabwe, in November 2017, the police raided offices of Magamba Network, a civil society organisation made up of journalists and content creators, where they seized devices belonging to the organisation such as laptops and printers on allegations of attempting to subvert a constitutionally government. elected More recently, from 2020 to date, several indications and attempts at mass surveillance have been noted, pointing to the possibility that journalists have not been spared in such blanket surveillance. In March 2020, the then army commander Edzai Chimonyo said the security forces would start snooping into private communications between citizens to ‘guard against subversion’ and claimed that the use of social media posed a threat to national security. (29) In October 2020, President Emmerson Mnangagwa addressed chairpersons of Zanu PF’s provincial women, youth and war veterans wings at the ruling party headquarters, where he revealed that through the use of ICTs, the government had the capacity and was tracking the locations of certain individuals and their communication details. (30) The above clearly highlights the depth of surveillance in Zimbabwe in addition to the aforementioned reports implicating the government in the use of cyberespionage tools. (31) Further, the numerous arrests of prominent freelance journalist Hopewell Chin’ono between 2020 and 2021 also indicated elements of STATE OF PRESS FREEDOM IN SOUTHERN AFRICA REPORT 2021 15 corruption.