National Security: FG to Begin Bugging of Phones

Federal government plans to introduce lawful interception (LI), a legally sanctioned official access to private communications, such as telephone calls or e-mail messages in a bid to enhance national security, prevent crime and aid criminal investigations, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can now reveal.
As part of the efforts, government is tinkering with legislation and regulations that will require service providers and Internet service providers to implement their networks to explicitly support authorized electronic surveillance.
Though lawful interception has existed since the inception of electronic communications in the form "wiretapping", it has become increasingly necessary now because of the sophistication of criminal enterprises in exploiting emerging communications channels.
The criminal activities pose real challenge to organizations responsible for protecting public safety including the police and courts,
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that under the initiative, in response to a warrant from law enforcement agency, lawful interception is performed simply by applying a 'tap' on the telephone line of the target.
It will be possible for security agencies in Nigeria to listen to terrorist and criminal cell phone calls and gather communications intelligence on their dark activities.
On the other side of the divide, concerns have been raised as critics said such move would amount to infringement of peoples' privacy.
Government and critics however agree that technology savvy criminals are the greatest threat to national security.
Latching on this, the office of the National Security Adviser (NSA) summoned all telecom operators in the country recently and tabled the proposed initiative.
At the meeting were the House of Representative Committee on Communications, telecom operators as well as the minister of information and communications.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that the office of the NSA has given all technical data to lawful interception and requested its vendors to contact their consultant for any clarification.
The office has also given a deadline which expired on July 6, for all technical enquiries following which it is expected to release the implementation schedule for the lawful interception.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that the federal government has directed its consultants to put in place law interception provisions including secure access to protect information and insure network integrity.
It is also expected to be undetectable with secure transport to authorized law enforcement agencies as well as scalable and high availability to accommodate changing network environments.
Lawful interception is expected to help address concerns over ARPU, telecommunications fraud, denial of service attacks, customer satisfaction, and growing security fears - particularly over global terrorist activities.
Chijoke Nwosu, a security consultant applauded the initiative and said that in today's unstable environments, the need for intelligence information is vital in preventing and combating crime.  He however warned that high security requirements for LI systems are important to prevent possible manipulation and misuse.
Nodding in agreement, John Iyene Owobokiri, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek in-house legal expert, however said that Lawful interception has a strong legal basis.
According to Owobokiri, there is need to complement the multifaceted regulation of lawful interception with elaborated provisions of law concerning the requirements for the design and development of lawful interception systems.
But the Amnesty International is concerned by instances where the provision of powerful surveillance and interception capabilities to repressive states are contributing to human rights violations carried out by the police, security and intelligence forces.
Though the organization said that it is not opposed to the transfer of surveillance in general, but such technologies have inherent capabilities that facilitate human rights abuses by security forces in repressive countries.