Kenya should minimize brute force in favour of data-driven intelligence

What you need to know:

  • Not having valid documents does not necessarily mean you are a terrorist, and neither does having valid documents absolve you from being one.
  • Data from a digital Occurrence book can be cross-checked and teased against banking, shopping or telecommunication data to reveal very interesting trends for our intelligence service.

The ongoing onslaught on the Eastleigh neighborhood in search of terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants is a fair attempt to address the rising threats to our national security.  Nevertheless, it raises questions about our security and intelligence strategy as a nation.

First, some human rights activists have argued against targeting communities in Eastleigh.

They choose to ignore the fact that most of our would-be-terrorists do hail from Somalia – where we are waging a war against Al-Shabaab terrorists.  Such terrorists would find a natural habitat in Eastleigh where it would be easier to mix and mingle within the majority of Kenyan Somalis who reside there.

So the target of Eastleigh is fairly accurate in terms of where one would likely find a higher number of suspected terrorists.  However, the target zone seems to be the only thing we got right. What betrays our lack of strategy is way the operation is being carried out. 

Doing a mass arrest in Eastleigh, where anything and everything is a suspect implies that we actually do not have detailed, specific targets. To put it bluntly, we seem to lack the intelligence necessary to pin-point and direct our operations.

Secondly, the operation seems to be heavy on flushing out illegal immigrants while forgetting that the real terrorists may actually have bought their way into the country by corrupting our crooked immigration personnel. For each illegal immigrant flushed out, there are perhaps five more entering our borders through corrupt means. We need to see as much action on stopping illegal entries into the country as there is in ejecting them.

In any case, not having valid documents does not necessarily mean you are a terrorist, and neither does having valid documents absolve you from being one. In other words, the current operation is likely to gloss over terrorists who possess valid documents while keeping a blind eye on those who are in the pipeline, waiting to illegally find their way into Kenya in the immediate future.

We must step up our Intelligence game by minimizing the current brute force approaches in favour of more intelligent ones if at all we are to win the war against terror in the long term. Intelligence is about data, and more specifically, about collecting, harnessing and mining this data. Big Data and its Analytics, is the term currently used to describe this business intelligence gathering process.

SQUEEZE OUT PATTERNS 

It’s not rocket science.  Supermarkets, banks, telecommunications operators and others have been using big data and its analytics for donkey years. Through their “loyalty” cards, ATM and credit cards or SIM cards, your service providers are able tell to the minute what you bought, how much you withdrew, or whom you called and for how long.

Using this information, the service provider can better position their offerings, by predicting and exceeding your needs well before you express them.

Does NIS, our National Intelligence Service with their multi-billion shilling budgets have Big Data Analytics as a key component of their Intelligence strategy? We may not officially know.  But if they did, they should be able to scrutinize this big data and squeeze out patterns and trends that can allow them to predict the terrorist's evil deeds, way before they tragically express them.

It is evident that the fundamental building blocks for big data analytics in our intelligence services is lacking. The infamous Occurrence Book, found at all police stations and used to record all manner and type of incidences remains as manual as it was in 1906, when the Colonial master instituted it.  Ideally, all entries in this book should be electronic in nature so as to enable data mining and analytics to be applied as a form of intelligence gathering.

The data from a digital Occurrence book can be cross-checked and teased against banking, shopping or telecommunication data to reveal very interesting trends for our intelligence service. That way, when intelligence accrued compels us to move into Eastleigh, there will be no need to clamp and shut down the whole neighborhood; we shall know exactly whom we want, where they stay and what they have in their terror workshops

Let’s forget the perennial talk we have heard over the last ten years about Forensic Labs, CCTV Cameras among other big budget security projects. Let’s start with basic, low-budget, high-impact projects without which the bigger projects above would not be effective.  This financial year, let us simply budget to automate the Occurrence Book and kick-start its corresponding Big Data Analytics.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter : @jwalu