Why Huduma NIIMS registration should be SUSPENDED.

Ms Gladys Kanini registers for the Huduma Number’s National Integrated Identity Management Systems at Manyatta market in Embu County yesterday. [Standard ]

On 18^th of February 2019, the Registration of Kenyans under the National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS) started in 15 counties on pilot basis, making Kenya home to the most privacy-invasive national ID system in the world. NIIMS now requires all Kenyans, immigrants, and refugees to turn over their DNA, GPS coordinates of their residential address, retina scans, iris pattern, voice waves, and earlobe geometry before being issued critical identification documents or accessing government services.

If the threat of losing your online privacy has you worried, registration of Kenyans under the national integrated management system ( NIIMS )should have you absolutely freaked out. It is deeply troubling that the Kenya Parliament passed a seriously concerning amendment to the country’s national ID law without public debate, and were approved even as a data protection bill which would designate DNA and biometrics as sensitive data is pending.

It is important to note that in the near future, it may not be difficult for someone with access to your DNA data to make a good guess about your ethnicity, your skin color, your propensity to obesity, addiction, bipolar disorder, attention-deficit disorder, early onset cancer, or Parkinson's, Huntington's, or Alzheimer's disease, not to mention the identity of your real father, siblings or kids.

Given Kenya's history of politicization of Ethnic Identity and corruption, collecting this data in a centralized database like NIIMIS could reproduce and exacerbate patterns of discrimination, identity theft, mass surveillance, etc

To make matters worse, unlike your credit card number, genetic data is, with a little help from social media, potentially self-identifying—even anonymous genetic data, as a group of computational biologists from MIT proved in a recent study. Yaniv Erlich and his students were able to use easily available, public information to identify anonymous volunteers who had contributed their genetic data to a database for scientific research. Disturbingly, the clues that led scientists to the identities of the anonymous donors came from information uploaded to the Web not by the donors themselves, but by relatives as distant as a second cousin, once removed.

I urge the government of Kenya to suspend the implementation of NIIMS and provide sufficient public debate and meaningful engagement to determine how such a system should be Implemented if at all. Also, I hope the Kenyan members of parliament will act swiftly to pass the Data Protection Bill of 2018.

UPDATE:

On 4th of April 2019, the High Court :

1. Suspended the collectin of DNA and GPS coordinates pending the determination of the NIIMIS case, filed by KNHRC.

2.  Suspended the mandatory roll-out of NIIMS. This means that the GoK cannot force any person to register n NIIMS.

3. Barred the GoK from issuing deadlines for the collection of NIIMS data, from making registratinon to NIIMS a condition for receiving government services, or sharing NIIMIS data with any foreign organization.

These orders are in place pending the determination of the NIIMS Case.


Silvano Ngacha is a passionate IT Professional, well versed in deploying Cloud Solutions, Business Intelligence, Web designing and development, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. He loves to write posts for his blog in his spare time. Besides Blogging, he is interested in career guidance, reading, traveling and horse riding.