One year from Westgate, what ICT lessons have we learnt?
What you need to know:
- Among other accusations heaped on our security forces, it is probable that they never bothered with reviewing the Westgate Mall footage from the remote back-up site, prior to storming the Mall during their rescue mission.
- If the immigration department is corruptly dishing out national IDs and passports to aliens at a fee, the SIM-card legislation is rendered impotent if not stillborn.
- It is highly unlikely that a big criminal mission of the Westgate magnitude can be successfully executed without the execution of smaller but related criminal activities.
One year ago terrorists staged a major attack here in Nairobi that held the nation hostage for three days. It was both a horrific and humiliating experience that the largest economy in East Africa could be held to its knees for so long by about four armed men.
What, one year later, has changed from an ICT perspective to make Kenya a safer place?
The Westgate Mall was well equipped with digital cameras that provided much of the closed circuit television (CCTV) footage of the tragic events as they unfolded.
Clearly, all public buildings and venues should now consider CCTV surveillance as mandatory. Additionally, remote back-up sites for the CCTV should also be installed to ensure that footage of events is not lost in the event the building goes down for one reason or another other.
But more importantly, security agencies must be apprised about the existence and usefulness of such footage. Among other accusations heaped on our security forces, it is probable that they never bothered with reviewing the Westgate Mall footage from the remote back-up site, prior to storming the mall during their rescue mission.
Nevertheless, it is comforting to observe that more public venues such as churches, mosques, shopping malls, banks, city streets, among others, have installed CCTV. Just like with the many fire extinguishers all over Nairobi buildings, however, Kenyans are notoriously good for installing but poor at maintaining and servicing such infrastructure.
There is very little assurance, therefore, that most of these digital cameras are indeed operational and fully backed up remotely.
TRACING PHONE CALLS
There must exist a body, both at the county level and at the national level charged with ensuring compliance to safety and public safety regulations. They should improve efforts to ensure that not only fire extinguishers but also CCTV cameras and similar infrastructure are functional.
During the attack, the terrorists could be seen consulting frequently on mobile phones. Mobile transmission technologies are able to record communication routes that investigative agencies can trace to establish who within the mall talked to whom during the siege.
Unfortunately, it appears that the SIM cards the terrorists used were fraudulently acquired, since they led to fake national ID cards and were therefore not useful.
The Kenya Information and Communication Act (2013) has a comprehensive set of clauses that make it a criminal offence for telecommunication providers to activate SIM cards that are not properly registered.
However, if the immigration department is corruptly dishing out national IDs and passports to aliens at a fee, the SIM-card legislation is rendered impotent if not stillborn.
This is why tackling corruption yields better returns in the fight against terrorism when compared with what technology can yield.
INTELLIGENCE GATHERING
CCTV and SIM card trace-back capabilities are good but only address the aftermath of tragic events. Similar if not more emphasis should be placed on preventive rather than remedial techniques in the fight against terrorism.
It is actually cheaper to prevent a terrorist attack than to recover from one, particularly when one considers that lives lost can never be restored.
The Westgate Mall may be reconstructed but the impact of the terror in terms of lost business opportunities for the merchants within and beyond the mall will never be recovered.
Prevention of terrorism depends on the intelligence capabilities of security agencies. Whereas the National Intelligence Service (NIS) has the greater obligation for intelligence gathering, analysis and dissemination, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has an equal responsibility to support the NIS in this task.
Without knowing about the internal operations of both these agencies, it is difficult to judge if they have improved their intelligence gathering since the Westgate attack.
SMALLER RELATED CRIMES
Nevertheless, two things still remain the same one year later. The first one is the manual occurrence book at our police stations. The second one is the manual finger-printing procedures at the CID offices.
How on earth are intelligence officers expected to mine or discover criminal patterns between data sets sitting in manual registers scattered at different offices across the country?
As we wait for the big expensive security projects to materialize, perhaps we could start small and digitize the occurrence book and the finger-print procedures across the country.
Once they are digitised, huge insights can be inferred from meshing these two very basic data sets. This is because it is highly unlikely that a big criminal mission of the Westgate magnitude can be successfully executed without the execution of smaller, but related, criminal activities.
These smaller criminal activities are always recorded in the occurrence books but never leveraged for new insights because of their manual construct.
A sure way of improving the preventive capabilities of the security agencies is to pick patterns among such smaller but related criminal activities. Let us hope we can digitize these two processes before the next commemoration of the Westgate attack.
Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter:@jwalu
