Zimbabwe's Military Wants Cellphone Restrictions

There's nothing quite like the terror of uncontrolled communications to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in those governments susceptible to them. Zimbabwe's military has accused the county's cell phone operators of threatening national security by using "independent connections" to the outside world, according to state media.

The mobile service providers have their own international gateway system, and from a security point of view, this is dangerous to the state because we need to monitor traffic coming in and outside, but at the moment we can not," the Zimbabwe Defense Forces director for communications, Colonel Livingstone Chineka, was quoted by the Herald newspaper as saying.

Perhaps you're wondering if they've already killed the internet there--or if they've run the country so hard into the ground it's immaterial, because no-one has access to it. In fact, the entire country was slowed to a crawl earlier this year after the government couldn't pay it's bandwidth bills.

It looks like the last thing standing between Mugabe's cronies and despotism is Zimbabwe's independent judiciary.

Zimbabwe army says cellphones danger to security