Practice what you Preach

Life is complicated enough without the addition of drama. You cannot deceive yourself, what on earth makes you think you can deceive others? Possibly because you constantly think that you're smarter than the pack. You know more.

This past week we had the drama of petitions in the Supreme Court of Kenya where the losing candidate petitioned for a review, really an overturn, of the election results announced. The court held that the elections had been fair and that the results would stand.

During this entire process, I was intrigued to listen to the various arguments, mostly around vote mischief, and I wondered if the lawyers presenting the arguments were really confident, technically, in their arguments. This is the one feature about lawyers that is intriguing to me, and also most frustrating, is that you require a certain amount of expertise to discuss the stuff that was being discussed, and I was not convinced of the technical expertise I saw.

IF YOU DON'T KNOW, BE SILENT

Take for example the allegation that documents were tampered with. It was alleged that the winner took votes from the loser, and the way that this proof was presented was by illustrating how some of the calculations at the polling station were doctored while on transit, or when actually submitted, to the collections centre. A lot of pdf images were shared with the lawyers zooming in on various sections of the document to show alterations. In addition to that, some system logs were shared showing access to systems by developers, foreigners (the system vendor) as well as elections management - who shouldn't have had access to some parts of the system.

I would have come to the same conclusion as the Supreme Court judges. But I would have challenged the petitions on a technical level.

While not saying that what was presented by the petitioner's lawyers was suspicious, or could not have happened, the supreme court judges simply said that what was presented was not enough to convince them. Which is the second part of my intrigue. I doubt that any of the supreme court judges are technology experts and would have known to ask the various technology questions to satisfy themselves that the technology platform was secure. In fact, in one submission, the vendor refused to supply some details of the system architecture (which I find strange) but offered superficial logging - without explaining how the logging was done. I could be wrong, but in rejecting the petitions, the judges didn't give me enough good reason as to why they were rejected.

I believe that it is partly due to the incompetent submissions by the petitioner's lawyers why the fraud, that may or may not have happened, was not highlighted sufficiently as a technology problem. That the technology failed was not explained as it should have been, to a technical panel. Instead, some very tedious technical detail was superficially highlighted and, at least it seemed to me, dumbed-down to the level that a child could understand. And as an I.T. professional myself, I could have said, woulda-coulda-shoulda.

Lastly, in explaining away the petitions, there were a lot of statements like "we were not convinced," or that there was lack of "sufficient evidence" and so on. It would have been good for this standard of evidence to be explained to us mere mortals, not of the judiciary. What's enough? In murder cases, the anecdotal smoking gun is something like DNA under the fingernails of the diseased. But what do you look for in an attempted hack? What's the smoking gun?

I doubt that these were questions that the judges would have been looking for, or at least, it did not seem so on the surface. And while I'm not a lawyer, and don't know what kind of training they get, this seemed to border way too much on the superficial. System logs are somewhat useful, but only when confirmed to be authentic and secure. We've seen the movies, and we know that logs can be altered. But I suppose they can form step number one in an investigation. A direction, a place to look and ask further questions that may lead to the truth. The blood trail tells you where to go, in order to find the body. But you must be willing to follow the trail.

All in all, I'm quite pleased that the IEBC has started to use technology to manage the country's elections. The move by the Kenyan Government to full eBusiness is to be congratulated as it will increase efficiency, and reduce the level of corruption at the lower ranks.