A member of the Computer Professionals Registration Council of Nigeria, Dr Chris Uwaje, says Nigeria needs a national database to be able to successfully fight cybercrime.
Uwaje, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Connect Technologies, made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Monday.
He said that in establishing the database, Nigeria would meet the United Nation’s framework for fighting the crime.
?“We need to establish a national database which would deal with everybody that is within the sovereignty of Nigeria so that you can know them because cybercrime is about people, infrastructure and domain.
“If you can register your properties like houses, the people and their places of work and have a national database, then every movement can be monitored through the use of the IT that everybody has and uses.
“For instance, in China now, a person would need a national identity card to log on to the internet to know that you are a person and that you are not anonymous.
“I think that is the way other countries are going to respond to cyberspace control,” he said.
?Uwaje said that the drive to checkmate cyberspace activities would likely result in an international control which was lacking now but might emerge in the future.
According to him, there must be a limit to which human excesses could be allowed to go on the internet.
?“If you say the internet is free and people can kill each other on it, then automatically it goes into a kind of conflict with the state which is supposed to protect life and property.
?“I think those are the thin lines. “
Yes the internet is a beautiful medium which can be used for research and building freedoms and we should be able to allow these freedoms to flourish so that innovation and creativity can emerge.
?“But if people are using the internet to make bombs, sell nuclear reactors, to tell people to go and assassinate people, then there should be counter measures because they cannot be allowed to thrive in that extremity.’’
He said the need for a moderator to define the “dos and don’ts’’ of the platform called for a governance team. Uwaje said that the benefits of the internet outweigh its disadvantages but its misuse informed the need for control.