Telecommunications in Angola

[7][8] ADONES (Angola Domestic Network System) consists of 1,800 kilometers of fiber-optic submarine cable linking eight Angolan coastal cities.

By 2010, the number of fixed-line providers had expanded to five; Angola Telecom established mobile-cellular service in Luanda in 1993 and the network has been extended to larger towns.

[1] Citizens have increasingly taken to the Internet as a platform for political debate, to express discontent with the country's current state of affairs, and to launch digital activism initiatives.

The positive impact of digital media tools in Angola was particularly noticeable during the August 2012 parliamentary elections when the Internet was used in innovative ways to advance electoral transparency.

[12] And aside from child pornography and copyrighted material, the government does not block or filter Internet content and there are no restrictions on the type of information that can be exchanged.

Defamation, libel, and insulting the country or president in "public meetings or by disseminating words, images, writings, or sound" are crimes punishable by imprisonment.

However, the government publicly stated that similar clauses regarding cybercrimes will be incorporated into an ongoing revision of the penal code, leaving open the possibility of Internet-specific restrictions becoming law in the future.

The proposed law would have given authorities the ability to intercept information from private devices without a warrant and to prosecute individuals for objectionable speech expressed using electronic and on social media.

Sending an electronic message interpreted as an effort to "endanger the integrity of national independence or to destroy or influence the functionality of state institutions" would have yielded a penalty of two to eight years in prison, in addition to fines.

[1] An April 2013 news report claimed that state security services were planning to implement electronic monitoring that could track email and other digital communications.