SIM card listing has not killed crime but privacy

A White Paper prepared by GSMA in November 2013, titled "The Mandatory Registration of Prepaid SIM Card Users," states: “While there is no doubt that criminals and terrorists use prepaid SIM cards to help stay anonymous and avoid easy detection, to date there has been no empirical evidence to indicate that:

1. Mandating the registration of prepaid SIM users leads to a reduction in criminal activities; and

2. The lack of any registration of prepaid SIM users is linked to a greater risk of criminal or terrorist activities.”

In 2010, the government valiantly argued that SIM card registration would help safeguard the public from criminal activities that are assisted by the mobile phone.

The applicable array included aspects of public safety, organised crime, terrorism and at that time, the more significant hate speech.

As the GSMA report states, that may have all been irrelevant, since no real evidence exists to justify the act.

Countries like Mexico, in the middle of a bitter drug war, ended up repealing registration three years after enactment, after it failed to produce results.

It is safe to assume the same applies here, since crime and acts of terrorism have not abated.

ANOTHER CRIME

However, another crime is silently happening, and the alleged legal precedent is cloaked in a few cobbled up lines obfuscated in barely related Acts in the Constitution, guaranteeing they always exist.

DUSKPALLET/Mystic

Our feeble attempt at defending our civil liberties as well as our ideology of true sovereignty have been severely undermined by a multitude of organisations, from the gun-toting thugs who freely and openly call and text each other in the commission of a crime, to terrorists who somehow operate invisible cells and execute orchestrated crimes through registered SIM cards.

Then there is the silent ‘thief’ who wants to know everything about you, regardless of your innocence. The intelligence.

DUSKPALLET has become the grossest violation of citizen sovereignty and national dignity.

Currently, it is being used to record the metadata of every phone call made in Kenya. Metadata, in this case, refers to your number, the person you called, where you were at the time of the call, where the receiver was at the time of the call, what networks you used, how long the call lasted and innumerable details of the call, thus building a pattern of your communications.

INFINITE STORAGE

The future threat is that it will be used to record every phone call in the country. After all, Mystic was used to record virtually every phone call in the Bahamas with the data stored for 30 days, with the possibility of infinite storage.

Your smartphone makes it even easier for intelligence agencies to access your data without proper authorisation, gain access to your passwords, location, and other bits of data you generate inadvertently.

With acts of terrorism growing in Kenya, the government is putting its intelligence gathering into high gear. Using Mystic as a benchmark, it is safe to assume that all our phone calls and messages are about to be recorded and stored for later scrutiny.

The data to be collected will range from our personal lives to who we send money to, owing to our unique and famous peer-to-peer mobile money platform.

Worse, as Kenyans, ethics, morality and accountability are not our strongest traits, so misuse of this platform by overzealous analysts, politicians, and other connected parties for purposes other than legitimate intelligence is inevitable. No assurances by government can guarantee otherwise.

Without proper procedures, managed by a solid accountability system with realistic mandates being executed by experienced staff, then the greatest violation of our civil liberties will freely happen in the name of crime prevention. Our privacy will no longer be guaranteed.