EDITOR, The Tribune.

There is a monumental crisis looming in The Bahamas.

On November 19, 2019, the Government announced plans to digitize all its departments. This entails scanning all documents and putting them into a digital format so that they may be accessed online. While this is commendable, the Government has chosen to remove existing paper documents from the public sector following the digitisation process. Once this occurs we will be completely digital, relying on electricity to operate every Government Department.

The problem with this should be self evident. In the event of a cyber attack on BPL which shuts down the electric grid in the Bahamas, not only BPL is affected but every Government department will be rendered useless until such an attacker’s demands are met. It matters not at all that there are back-up systems to protect the digitized information if that back-up is also dependent on electricity. Once electricity is lost, Bahamians will not be able to run their own country. It is paramount that we avoid such an event at all costs.

The second problem concerns the integrity of any such system. While the Government must have made provision to secure the digital information by some back-up process, any fraudulent tampering with documents is left solely to public service personnel to discover. The general public loses in the new system the ability to question the integrity of what is claimed to be recorded. In the current system, the fact that the Government must make the originals available to the public for inspection protects against internal fraud. Any change, alteration or deletion to a paper document is easily detected, but where the only document the public has is digital and it can be modified by high tech programmes, the opportunity for fraud is increased exponentially.

This seems such an astonishingly bad decision that we have to ask what might motivate an honest government to choose to shred original public documents so as to make public fraud more difficult to detect? Surely the Government must know that once prospective land purchasers lose confidence in the integrity of the system, the land prices in the Bahamas must plummet and with it will fall the quality of life for many.

On 14th January, 2021, the Ministry of Finance published on its Facebook page that it would be digitising the courts. The Government boasted that the new Integrated Case Management System would allow inter-alias court officers to manage all aspects in the life cycle of a case via an electronic scheduling feature. This programme sounds astonishingly similar to an American programme called PROMIS that allowed the US Government as early as the 1980s to follow all its prosecution cases no matter the operating system being used. This system, however, is known to have been hijacked by a certain other country who put a back door into it and began to sell it to governments around the world.

This allows that country to enter the system, modify the information at will and leave without being detected. Imagine what happens to your land registry system if it can be modified by a foreign power without the knowledge of the host country? Imagine the damage it would do to our court system if it were allowed to be the system which we used. Why compound that problem, whatever it is, by removing any ability on the part of your own people to remedy the situation by shredding the paper back-up?

Making matters worse, is the fact that the company installing this programme is foreign. There is no way to fully vet these people or control the national security information they have once they have completed their work and left the country. Whatever Government takes control of the country on the September 17th, they must revisit this decision and make the necessary changes to protect our nation.

CONCERNED IN

THE BAHAMAS

Nassau,

September 18, 2021.