This archive report was first published on 4 October 2019.
On October 4, 2019, the Principal Secretary for Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) Mr. Jerome Ochieng testified in court that the data collected during the National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS) exercise is securely guarded.
According to Ochieng, the government has put in place stringent measures to safeguard the citizens' data that has been entrusted to the ICT Ministry.
During cross-examination in a case where the government has been sued to explain why it has not published the data it collected during the Huduma Namba exercise, Ochieng stated that all personal data has been secured to protect the privacy of individuals.
He added that the data would not be published due to security reasons, citing the risk of exposing the system to hackers.
“We have not published documentation online because we do know to what extent it will go as this will be exposing the system to hackers,” he said.
PS Ochieng also assured that the GPS information could not be used to locate individuals and that the system which was built by Kenyans in the country is a high breed design system that is both centralized and decentralized.
The NIIMS exercise aimed to create a single data source that could be used as a cross-reference of all other multiple documents, such as passport and civil registration bureau.
He told the bench that having a single source of truth would help to maintain the sanctity of a single source of truth as it controls altering of documents.
“We have multiple databases that do not talk to each other. Some are not even clean data. We took that opportunity to clean the data, make it authentic by cleaning and automating it through biometric data which was done through fingerprints,” said Ochieng.
The case has been filed by the Kenya Human Rights Commission, the Nubian Rights Forum, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNHCR) with support from other civil society organizations.
