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"speaker_name": "Hon. Musimba",
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"content": "I thank you, Hon. Speaker, for that indulgence. This is, indeed, a timely Bill to have been brought before the House. It is momentous that Members familiarise themselves with what cyber space is. It is very easy to get terminologies especially in the Information Technology (IT) world and wonder where the space in society is. Most people were recently referring to information being stored up there in the cloud. The cloud refers to a system of servers. It is nothing different from what you have before you in your own computer or indeed, even within this House – the HANSARD – what is being stored up at the office. Once you start establishing what cyber space is, it means it is a system of connected devices which speak to each other. Currently, in Kenya, we are standing at beyond 41 million connected devices and around the world we are globally, through them, connected to over a billion devices. As such, the necessity of this particular Bill in terms of protection and ranking, you will have to rank the threats which come as a result of what is cyber security. So, when you look at issues, for instance, the advent of a nuclear war or potentially one of our neighbours threatening Kenya’s sovereignty by launching bombs into it, this is the space where a cyber threat sits because in the click of a button, Kenya can be alienated instantaneously. This is what I was raising at the beginning when with your guidance, you referred to the committee that I can make substantial presentation as to where this particular Bill should sit. This Bill, in my humble submission, should sit under the security organs. I looked at the provisions of Article 240 of the Constitution, which guide the President and, indeed, the National Security Council, to be the ones who have an overall charge of security matters. In the recent times when the Cabinet Secretary, Mr. Mucheru, was called before the Senate to explain part of their actions as regards national security, he ably, on record on the HANSARD in the Senate, said that: “Please, refer these issues to the National Security Council ably chaired by the President himself.” This is a multilateral effort to secure our borders. It requires much more than one particular department of the Government. In this particular instance, a cyber attack can be from within the country and outside of the country. For instance, someone from Tanzania or Uganda, God forbid, would want to undermine the sovereignty of Kenya and cause serious havoc and damage to our critical systems. How do you respond to that? By the time you count one, two, three, four, five, that damage has already affected us. We have experienced this in recent times when our entire network of mobile money transfer was hindered for well over eight hours, which caused serious anxiety in the country. Until today, nothing has come on record as to what the reason was. These are the sort of threats which bedevil a country like ours and within the cyber space. With the growth of IT and, indeed, the information age, you can see that we are uploading things to do with identity. Before the advent of the internet in the 90s, the best you would reach out to someone was through calling someone to become a pen pal of yours by way of writing letters such that data was largely manual and archived within libraries. However, in the modern age through the social media, you are able to reach billions and billions of people through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter handles and so forth. As such, your identities are well residing on the internet. I can erase your own existence. So long as somebody has access to a registration portal, he can enter into it and erase your very existence. When you go and present yourself and say, “My name is Patrick Musimba,” I will be asked: “How are you Patrick Musimba? How else would you identify yourself?” You say: “I have a birth certificate.” They say: “Oh, your birth certificate is fraudulent because you are entering into our systems and it is The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}