Adopt technology to win the war against terrorism

The heinous and cowardly terrorist attack at 14 Riverside Drive earlier in the week has received widespread condemnation at home and abroad. We owe it to our gallant soldiers who sacrificed everything to ensure more than 700 people were safely evacuated from the death trap.

Sadly, we needlessly lost nearly two dozen lives. While there are many lessons to be learnt out of this, as a country we demonstrated that we have come a long way in disaster preparedness – especially after Westgate. For starters it is reported that first responders arrived within 15 minutes which is a global standard.

Then there was great coordination within the multi-agency team which made the search and rescue effort faster and more efficient. Additionally, the nation was kept abreast of the situation through regular and accurate updates from the authorities. And the media displayed unmatched patriotism in their coverage and reporting. An unspoken hero as all this unfolded is technology especially CCTV surveillance which played a great role in the immediate response and which will now be heavily relied upon as detectives piece together crucial evidence to bring to book all the criminal elements involved in the attack.

Terrorists constantly evolve their tactics and we must remain a step head to make it harder for them to operate. Changing security needs will require smarter solutions and in technology, therein lie endless opportunities if we are to get an upper hand on the war on terror.

As a start, we should continually increase the density and coverage of the national security surveillance cameras beyond Nairobi and Mombasa and because it is not feasible for the government to install a CCTV camera on every street and building, we must explore a way of integrating the thousands of private surveillance cameras to the security agencies.

We can take a cue from the City of London which has over 500,000 cameras including private ones linked with the police surveillance system. We should also exploit advances in biometrics, artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Today it is not possible for human beings to monitor and analyse all the data gathered by tens of thousands of cameras. But video analytics technology (VA) can.

This is software that uses sophisticated algorithms to automatically identify specific objects, behaviour or attitudes in video footage. The software is able to continuously generate persons or situations of interest which the authorities can then use to build a database for closer monitoring, intelligence sharing or arrest.

This type of early warning system is the best approach to averting serious damage or injury. For example, it is reported that one of the suspects in the Riverside attack visited the premises on several different occasions while planning the attack. It is possible that a facial recognition system triangulated with an international criminal database would have picked this as a person of interest. Internet technologies such as crowdsourcing can also be used to gather intelligence.

Crowdsourcing is the use of an undefined, generally large group of people to perform a task traditionally done by a specified agency. Think of it this way - the law enforcement authorities can only put out so many boots on the ground. But a smart mobile application where the general citizenry can anonymously report suspicious activities complete with dates, location information and images can greatly aid intelligence gathering.

GEOFFREY WANDETO, development consultant.