A few years back, the streets of
Nigeria were barely illuminated by street lights. People walked hurriedly
through shady alleys and dark streets, looking in all directions every few
seconds in the hope that fellow pedestrians were not muggers, bag snatchers or
bold-faced thieves who could stop you on the road and directly demand that you
hand over your valuables or get killed. There were even certain places that,
like any shady neighbourhood anywhere in the world, people would not pass
through after 7pm in the evening. Certain streets became devoid of life after
the last rays of the dying sun had faded into the ether.
Fast-forward to the present day.
Hoodlums are finding it very hard to lurk in dark nooks and crannies of town. Halogen
lamps are almost everywhere, especially at spots where people are known to have
been robbed and perhaps lost their lives. The people now breathe easier when
chance finds them on a lonely road home. And something else has quietly made an
appearance on once-dirty, badly lit streets, major highways and mainland
bridges: CCTV cameras.
Telecommunications companies
first introduced them as aids to avoiding traffic hold-ups. You could log on to
their network, access any of these cameras live, and check specific routes for
as long as you wanted for signs of traffic build-up. Tech-savvy people heaved a
sigh of relief, and some folks began to see a new kind of light: security
surveillance via street cameras. Suddenly proposals started flying back and
forth for the supply of equipment for this new way of doing things. And more
cameras have appeared on our well-worn streets. Strangely, there is something
missing in this new show: Central management and cohesive data collection/storage
and management.
There is a strange absence of Datacenters, where all the raw
surveillance data should be consolidated, secured, backed up and managed. There
are very few ITIL Certified people in the country who can actually manage such
massive data. It appears that once again, Nigerians have experienced and
enjoyed cutting-edge technology in other lands and desire to fly before we can
walk. Banks have CCTV cameras, but the government knows nothing about what lies
in their records. Roads that are prone to traffic congestion now have cameras,
but it doesn't appear that Telcos are keeping much of a record of the video
they are capturing live from the streets. If they do, the government does not
seem to be aware of this, nor does anyone seem to care. Even more disturbing is
the fact that electronic/technological evidence (the category in which CCTV
data falls into in the Nigerian constitution) is not yet fully admissible in
court. The closest acknowledgement the government has made about the importance
of technology to crime, and its mitigation thereof, is the so-called Cybercrime
Bill, which still sits somewhere in the two Legislative Houses unable to emerge
as law.
This has made it very hard for the Police to properly apprehend and
prosecute Internet Fraudsters, but that is sweet gist for another day.
I think it is time that our
forward-thinking technocrats start addressing the issue of systems integration
and data consolidation. Nigeria has still not gotten the hang of properly
hosting internet services/webs/networks, not to talk of having structures in
place for managing and maintaining extensive disparate networks of devices and 'things' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things, or an alternate view of this phenomenon at Mckinsey's http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_Internet_of_Things_2538, which requires you to register to read the complete article) streaming live audio and video data into private storage. These pockets of raw data should be properly managed and connected for future data
extraction, collation, analyses and mission-critical decision making. I hope
our 'Security Experts' start showing themselves worthy of the appellation.
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