Nigeria Content Online

The revolution in
information and communication technology continues to propel organised
crime, armed banditry and sectarian violence, all of which pose grave
threats to national security. Criminals and subversives based at
different and far-flung geographical locations can now network, plan,
coordinate and execute attacks by phone or the Internet, beyond the
reach of law enforcement agents. Also, the Internet has turned out an
open-source for know-how on any subject, crime and criminality
inclusive. The December 2009 botched bombing of Superscreen TV station
in Lagos, the 2001 twin tower bombing in the United States, sectarian
violence in some parts of this country and pervasive armed banditry,
all owe their sophistication and devastation to unrestrained negative
deployment of both the cell phone and Internet. And because of the
sheer enormity of the devastating outcomes, it is now wiser to pre-empt
or disrupt crimes through proactive action, rather than embark on
reactive and palliative measures, which regrettably, the N6.1b SIM card
registration venture is all about. That is why the usage of both
technologies (cell phone and the Internet) has come under the security
scrutiny of governments in other lands for both strategic and proactive
law and order maintenance. The obvious truism being that if a people
can keep tabs on the communications that go on in the land, their
security would be highly enhanced.

Proof abounds that
many countries are already mitigating the risks posed to national
security by the revolution in the information and communications
technology industry. While it is true that failure in intelligence was
fingered for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and similar ones on
some European countries, we all can testify that those nations have
remained almost impregnable to such crimes ever since. They deployed
technology to keep tabs on all phone and Internet traffic in and out of
their territories.

There is no email
or phone call, whether national or international, that escapes the
security scrutiny of America – the acclaimed land of liberty. The same
thing goes on in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and even in some African
countries. Terrorists can no longer replicate 9/11 kind of attacks.
Therefore, our own security apparatus should rise to the challenges of
the times, with intelligence gathering and surveillance activities
becoming technology driven. Technology driven intelligence gathering
should pre-empt crimes, bust those that are ongoing and facilitate
investigation into those that happen to take place.

One more
justification for technology driven intelligence gathering and
surveillance is that besides their speed and capacity for mass
destruction, the magnitude of present day crimes transcends emphasis on
the numerical strength of security personnel to curtail or defeat. This
is because criminals are already seizing the initiative by employing
technology and, expectedly, nullifying the numerical superiority of our
law enforcement agents. After all, that is what technology is all about
– achieving much more than is humanly possible.

Therefore, with the
present scenario, raising national security budgets appears to be
attracting no proportional security or reduction in crime. Incidents of
armed robbery, kidnapping, assassination, religious fanaticism, ethnic
war and political thuggery appear rather to be on the rise. The crime
rate is overwhelming our security apparatus in terms of men, materials
and machinery. The ever-widening gap between national security budgets
and the rising tide of crime demands judicious deployment of scarce
resources in the war against crime. There should be more rational
responses to crime problems by using security intelligence data to
proactively target people, locations or activities thought to pose
future threats, rather than simply reacting to reported offences. That
is sure to result in some budgetary savings alongside the main benefits
of proactive law and order maintenance.

But while the
telecommunications service providers in some other countries are now
the arrowheads in the deployment of technology to supply leads for
preempting attacks, busting ongoing crimes or apprehending criminals,
the contrary is at present the case in this country. It is on record
that operators in our own telecommunications industry have been citing
cost as their excuse for not incorporating security intelligence
gathering technology into their networks. That appears the only
dignified way of insisting that it is the government’s responsibility.
As the tier of government constitutionally mandated to secure lives and
property, the federal government is being expected to shoulder the
financial burden of procuring the technology. And that is actually how
the technology was introduced in some other countries.

The revolution in
information and communication technology (ICT) has opened communication
gateways to both the good and the bad. Law abiding citizens and
anarchists alike, now enjoy greater freedom of association and speech,
made possible by ICT. And if their disadvantages must not cancel out
their advantages, Nigeria must monitor her telecommunication gateways
as a necessary restraint on criminal and destructive usage. The longer
we delay taking that decisive step, the more we lay bare our underbelly
at the mercy of criminals and anarchists to whom ICT has become
indispensable in the coordination and execution of their destructive
activities.

John Uwaya lives in Lagos, Nigeria