The third part of this piece published last week reviewed  ways in which the intelligence community can be reinvented, indicating that the first step is to fund it and train its personnel effectively

By Eric Teniola

I DO not know whether they alerted the government enough before the EndSARS protests began.

It is one thing for the security agencies to inform the government of what will happen, it is another thing for the government to take pre-emptive action. I do not know whether the action of our youths and the looters caught the government unawares. It’s about time we reorganise our security apparatus to meets the demand of modern day technology.

Things have changed to warrant a comprehensive reform of our security apparatus. The internet is here, so is the social media. How effective was the monitoring power of our security agencies in the EndSARS wars? How come the youths were steps ahead of the government in implementing the protests? The cyber war is here in full and I do not know whether our security agencies are aware of the gravity of this war.

As predicted we have been told that in the cyberwar that attackers will outpace incomplete and hurried patches, cybercriminals will turn to blockchain platforms for their transactions in the underground.

Banking systems will be in the crosshairs with open banking and ATM malware, deep fakes will be the next frontier for enterprise fraud and managed service providers will be compromised for malware distribution and supply chain attacks. Do our security agencies have enough equipment to fight this cyber war?

In the past days, if you sent a letter or someone sent you, it could take days and sometimes even months to read letter at the destination. In modern times, you can send a letter or important information to anyone in the e-mail all over the world through the internet. And, it often will be delivered to the destination in less than a minute.

You can also use other forms of communication, such as VOIP and chat, they also enable you to send any information instantly to anyone in the world. With the internet, online forums also allow people to connect with each other where they can share common interests and talk about what they enjoy.

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Furthermore, you can share ideas or views with anyone by making an online video call through applications like skype, line, etc. That is the power of the internet and we saw it in use by the youths in the EndSARS protest.

Our security agencies must be well equipped to track these new inventions.The youths by the EndSARS protest have shown how powerful they could be in this internet world. I commend them. They have reawakened our minds to global developments.

In a way they are heroes, the government must have to react now by taking a step in being proactive. We do not need to regulate the social media.

The social media is the way of the world now. We need to embrace it, adapt it, improve on it and exploit it to a positive end. The youths have taught us how to do it.

The EndSARS protest have offered us new opportunities. We must not waste it.

Lest I forget, why should we have police barracks? We don’t need police barracks in this country. It is a colonial legacy.

By having police barracks we have quarantined the police personnel from the ordinary Nigerian, hence their brutish, swinish and sometimes beastly behavior.

Allow the police to live among the people so that they can understand the feelings and attitude of the people they are supposed to work with.

Vanguard News Nigeria