[kictanet] Has IEBC Voter Register Been Compromised

Thu Feb 14 11:25:29 EAT 2013

Hi Listers and laggards

I hope I am not in isolation in the two faced nature of this country when reading the statement by Dr. Ndemo on the issue of unsolicited messages on our mobile phones in relation to the proposed Kenya ICT Master Plan?

The Kenya ICT Board is set to launch Kenya’s four year ICT master plan. It projects that by 2017:
1.     Every citizen, resident, home and institution will be connected through a countrywide robust, accessible and affordable ICT infrastructure.
2.     Kenya will become the leading ICT HUB in Africa attracting leading global players and generating globally respected local entrepreneurship and innovation.
3.     Public Services will be available to all citizens through ICT and ICT will enable a truly open and efficient Government delivering meaningful value to citizens.
4.     Kenya will be a Knowledge Based Economy. All Kenyans will be able to use ICT to improve their knowledge, businesses and livelihood. ICT will contribute greatly to Kenya’s economic growth.

To me, mobile is the new mass media and therefore can no longer be treated as a private means of communication in the same way that you cannot stop a TV or radio station from delivering content to your device and as with the other device you have the capability built into your device to change channels.  When you buy a newspaper you get the full shebang, you cannot request for a copy that does not have the adverts of your competitors.  

Dr. Ndemo, you would better serve this industry and the country as a 
whole if you came up with solutions to some of this minor issues rather 
than venting.  You keep raising issues about the need for opendata so 
why not practice what you are preaching, issue a short code to all the 
political parties and then have them send out an opt in request to all 
mobile phone owners (18 million x 5/- =  90 million shillings x 11 
parties = 990 million x 2 messages = 1.98 billion shillings).  

Allow the mobile companies to make available location information to developers so that location specific messages can be sent out, we have a self tethered electorate so lets use that to change their lives. After the election the same app could be used to send messages to people caugh up in a traffice jam explaining the reason and offering alternative actions such as "turn off car and read newspaper as you are going nowhere for the next 20 minutes as the Governor is going home".

After making this money provide the political parties with the voter register in the format indicated in my post yesterday (also available below for those not reading on their berries and apples) and allow those with the skills to develop a radically new campaign method, this will create direct jobs for at least 1,000 highly skilled developers and 10,000 programmers  meaning that in 1 day you will have created high level jobs at the fastest rate ever done in the history of political and bureaucratic rhetoric.

Let us use this window of opportunity that has presented itself to 
make this the most tech savvy election ever held in the whole world, let
 us make such an impact that the rest of the world will come calling for
 more than mPesa and Ushahidi.  We can either take up the mantle or just seat back and tweet before resuming our "na omba . . . " campaigns.

To be able to implement the requirements of the new constitution we must change our mind sets and approach, KPLC as well as the various water supply companies will soon be required to provide services not by choice or political patronage but to meet  the requirements of the bill of rights so in the same way let us not hold back the tide of technology as relates to communications let us instead embrace the changes.

In the heydays of KPTC all the telephone numbers where published in a 
book called the telephone directory and it was not deemed as a privacy issue, if you did not want your number 
listed you would have to pay for un-listing, which was the practice the world 
over.  So I laugh when I read a so called techie, who likely uses an "i"
 device with a quad core processor, complaining about unsolicited SMSs yet we intend to become a knowledge economy in the next 4 years.  

The 
999/- mobile phone has a feature where you can screen incoming messages 
so let us stop complaining about side shows especially so close to the 
countries most transformational elections.  If you cannot read the phone manual to become knowledgeable how do we intent to become a knowledge economy?  A smart town, city or country occupied by not so smart people is a recipe for disaster, ask yourself why the natives who where found in Egypt and Columbia had no idea how the pyramids where built.

Every day as I drive to town I am bombarded with posters and billboards sending me messages that I did not request.  The walls, street signs and direction boards on which this posters have been plastered are done without the consent or authorisation of the owners so if the government with its machinery cannot charge a political party/candidate (yet they have their pictures and names plastered on the poster) for defacing street signs which is illegal how do they expect to track down some mass SMS spammer sitting in Afghanistan? 

Regards.

PS.  I am surprised no one noticed the error in my previous post where I indicated IPv4 instead of IPv6

Robert Yawe
KAY System Technologies Ltd
Phoenix House, 6th Floor
P O Box 55806 Nairobi, 00200
Kenya

Tel: +254722511225, +254202010696

________________________________
 From: Brian Ngure <brian.ngure at gmail.com>
To: robertyawe at yahoo.co.uk 
Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke> 
Sent: Thursday, 14 February 2013, 9:07
Subject: Re: [kictanet] Has IEBC Voter Register Been Compromised

Hi All,

More developments on this topic: http://elections.nation.co.ke/news/PS-accuses-candidates-of-hacking-registrars-database/-/1631868/1692942/-/1y9rn1z/-/index.html

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Ali Hussein <ali at hussein.me.ke> wrote:

+1 Robert
>
>
>Ali
Hussein
>CEO, 3mice interactive media ltd
>Partner, Telemedia Africa Ltd
>
> 
>Twitter: @AliHKassim
>Skype: abu-jomo
>LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassimBlog: www.alyhussein.com 
>
>
>On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 10:51 AM, robert yawe <robertyawe at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>Hi Harry,
>>
>>Not being a lawyer please indulge my ignorance, when you get an ID card it is that the public can confirm who you say you are therefore it is not a private but a public record.
>>
>>When you register as a voter you are going to elect public office bearers therefore your voter registration information is public information.
>>
>>I hear you on the issue of getting targeted but which is the greater evil the likelihood of you getting evicted or the likelihood of an election being compromised?
>>
>>My take is that the voter, SIM card, ID, passport, prison, land ownership and motor vehicle information need to be made publicly available for scrutiny by all and sundry with a means to monitor who has accessed the data (IPv4).  All the data I have mentioned is available to a select few which means that the
 playing field is therefore uneven.  
>>
>>With a select few having access to the data is more harmful especially since there is no way of any of us knowing who they are or what is their agenda. It truly pains me when a nation with such great minds at times like this reduce themselves to rock painters.
>>
>>In the run up to the last censors we ran what we called the "tribe Kenya" campaign which resulted in the ministry of planning being forced to define a new tribe called Kenya, whose code is 722, for those who wanted to respond to the tribe question as "Kenya" and not other. In addition the training materials for the enumerators where changed to indicated that no one should be forced to provide a specific tribe and neither where they to make any assumptions based on name.
>>
>>After the results where released it was recorded that 612,000 households across the country are members of the tribe "kenya".  If I had a way of contacting this
 fellow tribes men/women of mine then we would be in a better position to plan our development and representation, which is one of the reasons that I am an advocate of making this data public.
>>
>>In closing, we keep questioning the results of the various opinion polls done by a myriad of organisations with all of us raising issues on sample distribution, ethnicity, gender and the like and more critically are they registered voters.  This is a very simple issue to solve if the voter register was publicly available and merged with the SIM register, all we would ask you to do is respond to an electronic opinion poll using your mobile phone.  The results could then be tallied and a comprehensive report provided that would answer many of the current contentious issues. 
>>
>>
>>Regards
>>
>> 
>>Robert Yawe
>>KAY System Technologies Ltd
>>Phoenix House, 6th Floor
>>P O Box 55806 Nairobi,
 00200
>>Kenya
>>
>>
>>Tel: +254722511225, +254202010696
>>
>>
>>________________________________
>> From: Harry Karanja <kkairo at gmail.com>
>>To: robertyawe at yahoo.co.uk 
>>Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke> 
>>Sent: Tuesday, 12 February 2013, 6:35
>>Subject: Re: [kictanet] Has IEBC Voter Register Been Compromised
>> 
>>
>>
>>On interrogation of legislation I've actually found that the Kenya Communication (Amendment) Act imposed stiff penalties for unauthorized access of data. So whether it came from retail agents or telcos (which is highly improbable) this MP is not supposed to have my data. I'd also discount the idea of cell broadcasting - which to the best of my knowledge had not been activated in Kenya for commercial use. The SMS originated from a UK number.
>>
>>
>>What is indisputable is that the aspiring MP accessed my personal data without authorization. The next challenge is who should be held accountable and how do I do this?  As mentioned earlier, targeted campaigning or marketing is only one use of this data - but what if someone based on my surname surmises that I do not fit into the electoral map, will there be another form of targeting to evict me from that constituency? (Here lies the futility of SIM registration as these SMS can easily be sent from UK or India)
>>
>>
>>The fears I have are real, for its happened before, and as most on this list can attest, technology has the power to make this process more efficient.
>>
>>Regards, 
>>Harry Karanja
>>
>>
>>Sent from my iPad
>>
>>On Feb 11, 2013, at 10:40 AM, Edith Adera <eadera at idrc.ca> wrote:
>>
>>
>>Harry,
>>> 
>>>Indeed the sources are many as others have said. Do we have a data protection law (and FOI law) in place? Or the 10th parliament left “hurriedly” without enacting it?
>>> 
>>>The scenarios of how an individual voter can be targeted are many and scary, to say the least.
>>> 
>>>Edith
>>> 
>>>From:kictanet [mailto:kictanet-bounces+eadera=idrc.ca at lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of Harry Karanja
>>>Sent: February 10, 2013 10:44 PM
>>>To: Edith Adera
>>>Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions
>>>Subject: [kictanet] Has IEBC Voter Register Been Compromised
>>> 
>>>Listers,
>>> 
>>>This morning I received the oddest message. Through a bulk sms provider, one of the aspirants for MP in my constituency sent me an SMS appealing me to vote for him in the upcoming elections? Now I say odd because to the best of my knowledge I have never communicated to this politician my number and my constituency. In fact the only person I have ever given this dual information is the IEBC during voter registration. 
>>> 
>>>Which begs the question, could IEBC or its registration clerks be making voter registers available to politicians for consideration or otherwise? I'm also curious if this is an isolated event or its happening elsewhere?
>>> 
>>>Now I don't need to emphasize on the very serious implications if politicians are in possession of such specific data on the electorate. I previously blogged (http://www.startupkenya.info/2010/08/chopping-up-big-green-giant-safaricom.html) on the dangers of telcos in possession of too much personal data, but it is nothing compared to politicians with this data especially in a country that has experienced deadly post election violence. 
>>> 
>>>I'm curious what measures IEBC has in place for the protection of our personal information and if my experience this morning portends the compromise of all future governmently held e-data?
>>>
>>>Regards, 
>>>Harry Karanja
>>> 
>>>Sent from my iPad
>>
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>>The Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) is a multi-stakeholder platform for people and institutions interested and involved in ICT policy and regulation. The network aims to act as a catalyst for reform in the ICT sector in support of the national aim of ICT enabled growth and development.
>>
>>KICTANetiquette : Adhere to the same standards of acceptable behaviors online that you follow in real life: respect people's times and bandwidth, share knowledge, don't flame or abuse or personalize, respect privacy, do not spam, do not market your wares or qualifications.
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>The Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) is a multi-stakeholder platform for people and institutions interested and involved in ICT policy and regulation. The network aims to act as a catalyst for reform in the ICT sector in support of the national aim of ICT enabled growth and development.
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