Niger's special forces prepare to fight Boko Haram in Diffa, March 26, 2015. | Source: VOA via Wikimedia
It was in the 2000s that Nigeria first faced the threat of Boko Haram, the affiliate of Islamic State in Africa. As President Muhammadu Buhari completes five years of being in power, which he got primarily for his plank of defeating Boko Haram, the battle still continues.
Buhari won the presidential election in 2015 against then President Goodluck Jonathan by touting his military background as an asset in defeating Boko Haram, which his predecessor was not able to do. While in his first few months as President he did show results by pushing Boko Haram out of some territories, the Nigerian military was unable to maintain the momentum as Boko Haram struck back with new tactics.
There is widespread distrust towards government officials and Buhari’s popularity has also eroded massively. The citizens are making their dissatisfaction known through anti government demonstrations. Meanwhile the administration seems busy playing blame games and guessing at where things are going wrong in the military’s efforts to contain the violence.
In June 2020, Nigeria saw one of its deadliest attacks in recent times, a hard turn from claims by the military in April that a Boko Haram leader appeared ready to surrender “based on body language.”
Boko Haram which means "Western education is prohibited" in the local Hausa dialect, first began in 2002 under Muhammad Yusuf. They called shunning the western influence in the social sphere and called for the enforcement of sharia even among non-Muslims. Its leader Mohammad Yusuf was killed in police custody in 2009. However the government authorities failed to utilise this opportunity and showed slackness in rehabilitating the group members, who moved underground, regrouped under new leadership, and continuing to terrorise even larger areas.
Many factors have been considered in piecing together what led to the creation of Boko Haram and how its existence has been sustained, ranging from support from ISIS, ability to internationalize as a group, and possible assistance from Libya.
The US and Europe have been seen as reluctant to extend any real aid, perhaps due to Nigeria’s oil reserves and a desire to keep African countries destabilised to maintain their neo-colonial stronghold in the region. Internally, corruption and laxity in action of troops has often been cited as big hurdles in controlling the situation.
Two Boko Haram vehicles destroyed. | Source: M. Kindzeka via Wikimedia
As for solutions, many have turned their focus towards rebuilding communities in the aftermath of thousands of people being murdered and displaced due to the ongoing violence. Not just civilian casualties, but a disastrous lack of necessities such as food, water and electricity is leading to a humanitarian crisis in the area falling in the conflict zone between Boko Haram and the military.
President Buhari currently seems slow to admit that Boko Haram cannot be “defeated on the battlefield alone.” Apart from improving the military’s response he must also take measures for alleviating poverty, destroying corruption and ‘de-radicalisation’ of those recruited into Boko Haram.
Some localised efforts are being taken to stabilise the situation by empowering communities to resolve conflicts, improving civil infrastructure, and reintegrating reformed militants.
However, localised efforts are short-term in nature, and their stability and success is greatly determined by the government which understands that more than killing the attackers, trust and active participation of its citizens is needed to resolve this conflict
The impact of Boko Haram on the people of Nigeria has been multifold, and the arsenal to ‘defeat’ Boko Haram must be expanded and redefined.
Support us to bring the world closer
To keep our content accessible we don't charge anything from our readers and rely on donations to continue working. Your support is critical in keeping Global Views 360 independent and helps us to present a well-rounded world view on different international issues for you. Every contribution, however big or small, is valuable for us to keep on delivering in future as well.
WhatsApp's New Privacy Policy: Collecting Metadata and Its Implications
According to WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, the app is set to collect “only” user’s Metadata. Metadata can reveal a lot more than merely the app usage of a person. Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker stated, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.”
This article explores the ways in which WhatsApp is underselling the true estimation of the significance of Metadata.
Facebook owned WhatsApp recently announced the update of its privacy policy terms. 8th of February, 2021 was initially set as the deadline for users to either accept the new privacy policy or delete their account. By this time, most of us have already witnessed or been a part of the backlash that WhatsApp is experiencing. LocalCircles conducted a survey and the results indicated that 15% of India’s users are likely to move away entirely from the app while 36% will drastically reduce the usage and 67% of users are likely to discontinue chats with WhatsApp business accounts.
To reinstall trust in its users, WhatsApp released a clarification stating that the new policy update doesn’t compromise privacy of messages with friends and family. Furthermore, it explains that the update includes changes related to WhatsApp business accounts are optional too.
However, owing to severe backlash, WhatsApp has pushed the deadline to May 15 while they further clarify their policy updates.
It is true that WhatsApp cannot read our messages as it is end-to-end encrypted which implies that only a message’s sender and receiver can read it. The updated privacy policy intends to alert users that some businesses would soon be using Facebook-servers to store messages with their customers. By accepting the new privacy policy, users will be allowing WhatsApp to reserve all rights to collect your data and share it with the expansive Facebook and Instagram networks ‘regardless of whether you have profiles on those apps.’
By using WhatsApp, you may now be sharing your usage data, your phone’s unique identifier, your location when the location service is enabled, among several other types of metadata. A culmination of all your metadata is linked to your identity.
The value of metadata has been underestimated since the term isn’t clearly understood. Metadata is data about our data. For instance, in a cell phone conversation, the conversation itself isn’t metadata but everything except that is metadata. Data regarding who you called, how long you spoke for, where you were when you placed the call, where the other person on the line was and the time you placed the call. Consider a situation when every time you made a call to someone, you had to inform a particular person about who you called, how long you spoke for, when and where and all other details except the content spoken. This applies for every single call and everyone else’s metadata is also being recorded. The person owning the metadata can analyze and tell a lot about your personal life. Who you work with, who you spend time with, who you are close to, where you are at particular times and so on…
Kurt Opsahl, in his post in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gives an example of how companies and governments collect intimate details about your life with the disguised use of the word called metadata. The following examples are an excerpt of his article:
“They know you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. They know that you called suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge.
They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance company in the same hour.
They know you called a gynaecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local Planned Parenthood's number later that day. But nobody knows what you spoke about.”
Metadata provides more than required context to know some of the most intimate and personal details of your lives. When this data is correlated with the records of other phone calls, one can easily obtain a lot more data and track our daily routines. This is merely about phone calls. WhatsApp includes a lot more features and will collect metadata of chats, businesses and money transactions.
In WhatsApp’s words:
“We collect service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (such as how you use our Services, how you interact with others using our Services, and the like), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports.”
In addition to this, WhatsApp also collects information about IP address, OS, browser information and phone number.
Stanford’s computer scientists conducted an analysis to understand the extent of intrusion of privacy using metadata. The scientists built an app for smartphones. The app was developed to retrieve metadata of calls and text messages from more than 800 volunteers’ phone logs. The researchers received records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts. Their inexpensive analysis revealed personal details of several people like their health records. Researchers were also able to learn that one of their participants owned an AR semi-automatic rifle with only metadata.
Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency once stated that “the U.S. government kill[s] people based on metadata.”
In 2016, Facebook was involved in the infamous data privacy scandal which centered around collection of personal data of over 87 million people by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting and strategic analyst firm. The organization harvested user data for targeted advertising, particularly political advertising during the 2016 U.S. election. While the central offender was Cambridge Analytica, the apparent indifference for data privacy to Facebook facilitated Cambridge Analytical and several other organizations.
In June 2018, Facebook confirmed that it was sharing data with at least 4 Chinese companies, Huawei, Oppo, Lenovo and TCL. Facebook was under scrutiny from the U.S. intelligence agencies on security issues as they claimed that the data with the Chinese telecommunication companies would provide an opportunity for a foreign espionage.
In September 2019, there were reports that the Indian government contemplated making it mandatory for companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to share the public data of users.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) was planning on issuing new guidelines under the Information Technology Act which according to which tech giants would have been required to share freely available data or the public information that they collate in the course of their operations, including traffic, buying and illness patterns.
Europe is exempted from WhatsApp’s new privacy policy as EU antitrust authorities fined Facebook 110 million euros for misleading the regulators during the takeover of WhatsApp in 2014. EU’s strict privacy laws empowers regulators to fine up to 4% of global annual revenue of the companies that breach the bloc’s rules.
Your Metadata is extremely personal. By giving WhatsApp the authority to access it, you are giving access to several other organizations, businesses and it also makes you more vulnerable to third-party hackers and trackers. WhatsApp has given multiple assurances about its updated privacy policy being noninvasive. However, most of these assurances are cleverly worded and misleading statements. It is important to read through the fine print of the new policy before accepting it.
