Put together by Teledom Group of Companies and its event management partner, Gamnet Solutions, the one-day summit on ICT intervention in national security emergency, pulled the military, police, customs, immigration, prisons and ICT experts to brainstorm on modern ICT tools that will enhance their day-to-day operations in the course of discharging their duties.
Addressing the gathering, CEO of Teledom Group, Dr. Emmanuel Ekuwem, explained that the ICT industry could help establish criminal databases with agency-specific graphical user interfaces for use by law enforcement agencies. “We can help with enabling legislations by the National Assembly, to intercept criminal discussions and conversations in our ICT networks by criminals prior to or during or after crimes. We can enable the retention by telecom operators and Internet service providers of call data and catch word-specific Internet and Intranet content for a reasonably long period of time to aid criminal investigations when queried by appropriate software engines,” Ekuwem said.
The summit, he added, was put together as a result of the group’s firm knowledge of the power of ICT to leverage national security operations. These range from intrusion sensing/detection, national identity data capture and management, biometrics data capture and storage, password-restricted access to stored data for both local and remote access, village-wide, town-wide, city-wide, state-wide and nation-wide surveillance (video with bi-directional audio), distributed and central/national storage/archiving with password-restricted access as well as with date-and-time-specific playback for criminal investigations.
Teledom Group, he said, “has the facilities to scan every piece of cargo, container, truck and vehicle that enters Nigeria at the seaports, airports and inland border posts. We can capture the number plates, biometrics of the driver as well as photographs and video clips of each port/border crossing into Nigeria by any cargo, container, truck, tanker or vehicle. We can scan on specific highways, roads, check-points, inland waterways, etc content of cars, trucks, tankers, boats and ferries as the case may be. The scanned bulk material data, the image and video can be monitored in-situ as well as remotely. The same outputs can be stored locally and remotely. Stored data, again, can be accessed remotely on a password-restricted basis.”
Ekuwem explained that with ICT, the law enforcement agencies could locate criminal callers within the cellular networks, by identifying the Internet Protocol (IP) address and trace such criminal.
Delivering a lead paper on “Critical Software Issues and Imperatives for National Security and Survivability,” Dr. Chris Uwaje, President of Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) said the challenge had been on how Nigeria could build protection mechanisms and reliable response for national cyberspace security, without jeopardizing the mission of enabling information sharing, both domestically and globally. What are the required legal framework and legislations for establishing basic cyber assurance? How would Nigeria empower indigenous IT Professionals with enabling environment and right incentive to deliver superlative solutions to the nation and her people?
In providing solutions to the challenges, Uwaje examined issues and challenges of Critical Information Infrastructure (CII) with special focus on the following: What do we understand by Critical IT Infrastructure and how do we navigate the complex landmines that impact on our national cyberspace security?
How do we, create, design and establish a proactive and sustainable model, capable of ensuring that a peoples’-first public/private partnership action plan is implemented? What legislations do we need?
He described cyber security to include protection against unauthorised access into systems; unauthorised modification of information; denial of service attacks; and information privacy violations. Government data communications network, he said “is composed of a secured internal network called an Intranet and an external, unsecured network, which is connected to the Internet. He further explained that ICT has come with tools to address all of these.
Addressing issues of ‘Critical Needs Assessment and Response to National Digital Security’ Uwaje said Digital Networks Security or Cyber Security issues continued to challenge government operations for building a highly secured information network for its operations which demand fast, reliable, and secure collaboration capabilities throughout the enterprise, from the data center and the desktop to geospatial applications involving multiple partners and huge amounts of data.
“Therefore, it has become a strategic imperative for government to establish a National Network Security Policy and Standards to control and protect the nation’s electronic environment and in particular, its entire operation, within the context of critical information infrastructure, where software represents the centre of gravity,” he said.
According to Uwaje, “our national software environment and critical solutions must be designed, deployed, managed and controlled by indigenous policy and workforce. The national cyber security agenda must be given a topmost priority and funding preference in our national budget. The ICT sector must be adequately protected by enabling policies, laws and sustainable strategies.”
Pleased with Nigerian ICT experts in offering ICT solutions to national security, the military, the police raised issues of domestication of security measures, and called on ICT experts to ensure proper domestication of foreign technology for better use by security operatives in Nigeria.
Ekuwem assured security operatives present of proper domestication of the ICT equipment and promised to make the security document available to security operative units, rather than individuals.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Emma Okonji
Quelle/Source: Daily Independent, 30.10.2010
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