Uganda’s Newest Gadget is a Porn-Detecting Machine

Indicators point to Uganda being a huge consumer of pornography and as iafrikan put it, “This can be seen in the sheer and insurmountable appetite for sex tapes and nudes of local celebrities and wild university students.” According to Google Trends, Uganda comes in sixth in a list of countries that searched “man fucking man” most, followed closely by Kenya and third in countries that searched “gay sex pics” falling behind Kenya.

Uganda has taken the step to ensure that they “stamp pornography out of the Ugandan society” as per Hon. Stephen Tashobya, Chairperson of the Committee on Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, words back in 2014 while presenting the Pornography Control Committee report in Parliament. One year ago, Uganda announced that it had ordered a pornography-detecting machine from South Korea all in an effort to combat pornography in the country.

The machine is said to cost around $88,000 and would have interesting features such as the ability to detect both deleted and current pornographic material, such as photos and videos, on people’s computers and phones. It has also been reported that the machine will most likely feature Deep Packet Inspection Technologies which allows for the identification of content from web traffic, its source, and its destination, meaning it would be possible for the Ugandan government to pinpoint someone who is accessing pornographic material, since every SIM card is registered to a particular individual.

In 2014, Uganda passed the Anti-Pornography Law, which sought to “create the offence of pornography.” With Pornography defined as “any representation, through publication, exhibition, cinematography, indecent show, information technology or by whatever means, of a person engaged in real or stimulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a person for primarily sexual excitement.”

According to the bill, if anyone was found guilty of the offence of pornography, they would be fined $3000 or up to 10 years in prison or both. The Ugandan government maintains that it’s trying to protect its citizens from porn but there’s a dark cloud hovering over people’s mind that the government could be up to some serious censorship plans. This is because, apparently, the machine also trace traffic from proxies, VPNs and Tor networks. Thus enabling the government to block any website that they wish. A worrying factor, considering there was a social media blackout in Uganda in 2016 during their elections.