Nubian Rights Forum & 2 others v Attorney General & 6 others; Child Welfare Society & 9 others (Interested Parties) [2020] eKLR 54. When cross-examined about his statement on the likely exclusion of women and the poor by the system, Mr. Anand stated the statement was made in reference to South Asian countries. He nevertheless insisted that unless he sees data-based evidence, he would still hold the same opinion about NIIMS. 55. Mr. Anand agreed that terrorism is a threat worldwide. His evidence was that terrorists will try to hack and gain access to systems. However, the threats would be minimised where correct expertise is applied. He denied suggestions put to him by Mr. Regeru that he was not an expert; that he was a partial witness; that he did not have any experience or knowledge of NIIMS; that his conclusions were based on conjecture and speculation; and that he was dismissive of local content and expertise. 56. In cross-examination by Mr. Bitta, the Counsel for the 1st Petitioner, Mr. Anand conceded that digitisation brings better service delivery and that countries cannot go back to the paper age. In his view, however, the law cannot fix what technology has broken, so that if there are mistakes in the system design, the law may not assist. He also stated that a functional data protection law will only exist where the system has the right architecture. He denied that he was a hacker, stating that he is a security researcher, and that he was contacted to give evidence for the 1st Petitioner based on the work he did on Aadhaar. 57. On re-examination by Mr. Waikwa, Counsel for the 1st Petitioner, Mr. Anand stated that the company he works for organizes technology conferences for technology practitioners. Further, that the papers presented in those conferences are in the computer science field. It was his view that the law should come before architectural design, noting that it is important to align projects to human rights. He contended that public confidence would be boosted where information on a project is in the public domain. 58. With regard to his contention in cross-examination that he knew what NIIMS was, he stated that he reached his opinion by considering its goals as set out in the pleadings of the Respondents, which showed that the system is centralised. According to Mr. Anand, a perusal of the data capture form disclosed that there were many other data bases by the number of identity documents required by the form. Further, as the system was going to link all the databases to the central database, it was a centralised and federated database linked to other functional databases. 59. Asked to define certain technical terms that he had used in his evidence, Mr. Anand stated that ‘enrolment’ is the process of giving personal information and biometrics for use in an identification system. Further, that ‘deduplication’ is an outcome in which no two entries should belong to the same person in a database, and every person should have only one entry in the database. He stated that ‘deduplication’ is a process of algorithms and thresholds that give a person an identity and links it with the system by giving the person a unique number for authentication. 60. Mr. Anand explained that multi-modal systems are used to achieve deduplication. He further explained that multi-modal systems combine data, whether biometric or otherwise, of a person, and compare it with previous data and assign a unique number to the person. He stated that one could not get an identification number from NIIMS if the database indicated that there was another like person in the system. 61. With regard to the meaning of the term ‘deterministic,’ he stated that it meant that something was going to happen no matter what. On the other hand, that the term ‘probabilistic’ meant that it was not known for certain if something will happen. In Mr. Anand’s view, it was mathematically impossible to say that the NIIMS system will be deterministic as one can only set thresholds for each biometric parameter in order to determine identity. 62. Mr. Anand also described how databases are linked. He stated that the linking would require similar fields of entry across all the databases which are then connected. He noted that databases cannot be linked if they are not harmonised, a term which he defined to mean that structures are similar across all databases. On ‘identity’ and ‘identification’, he stated that ‘identity’ means giving legal recognition to a body that exists, whereas http://www.kenyalaw.org - Page 11/174