The Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) has condemned as “evil” the Jonathan administration’s $40 million ambitious internet spy programme awarded to an Israeli firm to secretly search out on Nigeria’s 47 million Internet users. The party urged Nigerians to resist the move.
The contract, undertaken by Elbit Systems, with headquarters in Haifa, will allow the government spy on citizens’ computers and Internet communications and emails under the guise of intelligence gathering and national security. Elbit announced the contract award Wednesday without stating the name of the benefiting country.
A report confirming the existence of the contract between the firm and Nigeria, has sparked some of the most intense debate in recent years over a federal government policy, with many rebuking the plan as invading the privacy of Nigerians.
In a statement in Lagos, the ACN noted how the government has failed to deny the story since it was published, apparently dispelling any doubt about the report’s credibility.
The ACN’s statement, issued by the party’s spokesperson, Lai Mohammed, said the move was an unprecedented assault on the civil rights of Nigerian citizens by the government.
”For a government that is increasingly paranoid, having failed to meet the yearnings and aspirations of the citizenry who are justifiably becoming restive by the day, the ability to spy on the Internet communications of citizens as well as to intercept and read private emails, not to talk of being able to suppress unwanted connections, is a potent weapon against the civil rights of Nigerians as well as the constitutionally-guaranteed rights like freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of association,” the ACN said.
”It is also common knowledge that journalists have borne the brunt of the administration’s increasing propensity to stifle freedom of expression and press freedom, while members of the opposition are being portrayed more and more as enemies of the administration, rather than being seen as indispensable allies in the nation’s quest to evolve a strong and enduring democracy,” the statement said.
The party said desirable as it may be for the government to gather useful intelligence on the terror groups, nothing can justify what will essentially become a weapon for harassment, intimidation and even decimation of perceived opponents by a desperate government.
”No government should have the right to play a ‘Big Brother’ role in the lives of the citizens, because this will ultimately herald the return to autocratic rule and sound the death knell of our democracy,” the ACN warned.
Elbit says it will take two years to complete the project, by which time it claimed, the administration will have “a highly advanced end-to-end solution, [to] supports every stage of the intelligence process, including the collection of the data from multiple sources, databases and sensors, processing of the information, supporting intelligence personnel in the analysis and evaluation of the information and disseminating the intelligence to the intended recipient.”
Many Nigerians believe however the government’s professed motive for the plan in generating anti-terrorism intelligence, the main package of the project would be deployed spiritedly check a flurry of embarrassing lashing administration officials have been receiving online.
The earliest hint that the Jonathan administration had desires to invade privacy of citizens surfaced early April when researchers at the Munk School for Global Affairs at the University of Toronto alerted the world that Nigeria, Egypt, and Kenya were deploying Internet surveillance and censorship technology developed by an American company, Blue Coat, which specializes in online security.
Blue Coat’s technology allows the government to invade the privacy of journalists, netizens and their sources. Its censorship devices use Deep Packet Inspection, DPI, a technology employed by many western Internet Service Providers, to manage network traffic and suppress unwanted connections.
DPI not only threatens the principle of Net Neutrality and the privacy of users, civic groups say, it makes single users identifiable and, in countries that flout the rule of law and violate human rights, often exposes them to arbitrary imprisonment, violence or even torture.
While details of the Blue Coat contract appears to have managed to evade scrutiny up till this point, our sources say the Elbit annunciation of the contract, opaque as it was, terribly rattled top administration officials – from the presidency to the National Security Adviser’s Office, and the National Assembly.
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