Ali,

This is the way I see it:

1. It's almost a forgone conclusion that Governments will listen in on communications between citizens; if the NSA could collect Americans private communications without court-orders and this with all the Bills of Rights in place, then what chance do other countries & Angela Merkel have?

2.What worries me more about the Vodafones of this world is that, their primary allegiance is not to the countries where they do business, but to their motherland, UK. Who would like to bet whether #G#H#C#Q# listens in on private communications from the Safaricom/Vodafone Network? Every Government Officials communication including our President's is fair game.

3. If then we contract the same Safaricom/Vodafone to build for us a 'Secure' Communications Network, you can bet that every router, switch, and Server that will be deployed with have pre-built backdoors just in-case they will need to be used in the future.

So, if indeed we know all the above, why go ahead and contract Safaricom/Vodafone to build our security network? Is it the lesser evil?

4. One of the reasons cited by GoK to single-source with Safaricom is that it is the only organization that is affliated to GoK that can do this. Which is exactly not true as I believe we do have a pretty significant shareholding in Orange and there is nothing as good as a competing offer to get you best value.

And a different angle to this, does our police really need an independent network (which also happens to be the bulk of the Ksh 15B that we'll be paying for?). Instead of building a single network and putting all our anti-terrorism 'eggs' in it, would it not have been more prudent and less expensive to use the already existing networks but with an added security layer and achieve the exact same result?

Rent the networks from anyone who has capacity (Safaricom, Orange, Yu etc) build your layer on top and you don't have to worry about 4G, 5G, 6G... As they upgrade, you upgrade.

Regards

On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 12:46 PM, Ali Hussein via kictanet <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:

Listers

In view of the debate about the security tender awarded to Safaricom and now in contention within the parliamentary committee responsible for this its incumbent upon all of us in the industry that we understand this issue deeper.

See below:-

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-vodafone-says-governments-have-direct-access-to-eavesdrop-in-some-countries-2014-06

I'm also curious to know what the TOR for this tender was. I'm all open to the government securing our borders against our enemies but we also must know what these parameters of 'snooping' are.

Ali Hussein

+254 770 906375 / 0713 601113

Twitter: @AliHKassim

Skype: abu-jomo

LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim

Blog: www.alyhussein.com

"I fear the day technology will surpass human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots".  ~ Albert Einstein

Sent from my iPad

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