Azimio’s petition is majorly relying on the technological delivery part, citing issues that were with the technology used hence appointing of ICT expertise to solve tools performance that’s the Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS) Kit tools.
The ongoing court hearing and petitions have brought into focus a need for legal and tech communities to engage, analyze and discuss with an aim of attaining the best verdict as the timeline nears.
This has in turn called for the involvement of the ICT team; John Walubengo, CISA, CDPSE, (OGW), ICT Lecturer, Multimedia University of Kenya, Consulting Data Protection Officer (DPO) Ajua, and Trustee at KICTAnet, former Industrial Engineer Dr. Joseph Sevilla, the Director, @iLabAfrica and @iBizAfrica, and Martin Mirero, the CTO at up and rising start-up Ajua have stepped up as proposed Amici Curiae (Friends of the Court).
The trio is expected to analyze and make observations as they play certain roles in the petition, the roles include; identification of the technological aspects of IEBC’s electoral system, (the Biometric Voter Registration – (BVR), the Electronic Voter Identifier (EVID), the Results Transmission System (RTS), and The Logs, they illustrate the workflow as stated by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).
Through the tech experts, there will be a revelation of easily comprehensible details of how the KIEMS kits worked as well as how the manipulation could have been done if it was or in case it wasn’t.
Dealing in digital forensic science, the availing of server logs as digital evidence is important as it will enable attain information on who accessed the server and when, as well as show the evidence source.
The three recommend that the court appoint a special IT audit team to “ascertain and report back on some of the contested areas regarding the technical aspects of the KIEMS.”
This comes in handy following the earlier affidavit of John Githong’o, that sought to expose the access of the IEBC servers by various people who weren’t eligible. A confirmation of illegal access will be based on systems IEBC put in place “to record the events around the compromise in what is known as “server logs.”
The possibility of hacking being in the picture arouses an urgency of conducting an analysis on the performance of the kits used in the election, research into its activities and operations during the whole process for scrutiny, and delivering the occurrences.
