It sounded like something straight from a sci fi movie.
'Government corporation contracts shady corporation to perform illegal hacking on its citizen's.'
Or more like something that would involve the nuclear totting superpower nations like America and the rest of her paranoid cohorts.
It sure didn't sound like something a third world nation would undertake; not when there were more pressing issues like electricity, poverty and sustainable livelihood to think about.
Yet it happened. And we wouldn't have had an inkling about it if fate had not dealt a hand in the proceedings.
An italian based hacking company known as Hacking Team, was itself hacked on Sunday night and 415 gigabytes of the firm's internal data was leaked to the public. Among the many unsavoury details that was released was one prominent one which detailed how the Bayelsa State Government of Nigeria had paid the sum of 98 million naira to the aforementioned coorporation to perform a co-ordinated internet attacks on its citizens. The information was classified under the category of 'intelligence.'
Because the contract between Hacking Team and the Bayelsa State Government was initiated in 2013 just before the Nigerian general elections and the Governor of the state was a loyalist to the incumbent administration, conspiracy theories have begun to spark about it being an illegal project engineered to shut down websites, blogs and social media accounts sympathetic or associated with the opposition party.
This theory has been strengthened by the fact that Bayelsa state is the hometown of the then incumbent president who was seeking a re-election campaign in a bid to return for a final term and the Governor who allegedly initiated the deal with Hacking Team was an avid sympathizer of his.
Researchers are still poring over the leaked data from Hacking Team which was announced using their own Twitter handle and spokesperson for the Bayelsa state Government has expressly denied any knowledge of the incident, describing the allegation against his principal as absolutely untue.
As expected, the Bayelsa state Government could not be reached to comment.
God bless Nigeria!
