Vision 202020: ICT’ll make Nigeria safer – Ekuwem

GROUP chief executive officer, Teledom Group, Dr. Emmanuel Ekuwem has said that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has the potentials to make Nigeria safer and even more secure in the spirit of actualising the Vision 202020.

Dr. Ekuwem while welcoming participants to a one-day stakeholder’s summit on ‘ICT Intervention in National Security Emergency,’ organized by his firm in collaboration with Gamnet Solutions Limited and Joint Action Committee on ICT Awareness and Development as well as Digital Sense Africa (DSA) in Lagos, last weekend, said that with ICT the law enforcement agencies in the country could locate criminal callers within the cellular networks.

He called for the enactment of enabling laws by the National Assembly coupled with the appropriate protection for critical national information infrastructure.

“We have to enact appropriate laws for our national cyber-security as well as protect our critical national information infrastructure,” he said.

He also said that the forum was organized based on his firm’s knowledge of the power of ICT to leverage national security operations.

“These range from intrusion sensing cum 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, and city-wide,” he said.

According to him, his firm has the capacity to offer state-wide and nation-wide surveillance (video with bi-directional audio) with local/in-situ, distributed and central or national archiving with password-restricted access as well as with date-and-time-specific playback for criminal investigations.

“Our ICT industry can help establish criminal databases with exciting agency-specific graphical user interfaces for use by law enforcement agencies,” he said.

Teledom, he said could help with the 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.

Also, he said, that Teledom could 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.

“We can scan every piece of cargo, container, truck and vehicle that enters Nigeria at the seaports, airports and inland border posts,” he said, stressing that ICT could be used to 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.

Equally, he said, there are technologies to scan on specific highways, roads, check-points, inland waterways, to name a few content of cars, trucks, tankers, boats and ferries.

As said by him, the scanned bulk material data, the image and video could 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,” he said.

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