APC lashes out at DSS for Data Office Invasion
The All Progressives Congress has berated the Department of Security Services for its statement of the reason why the party’s Data Office was raided.
The party’s National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed, addressed a press conference in Lagos on Tuesday, saying a self-respecting intelligence gathering service should do better than basing its investigations on “beer parlour gossip”.
The DSS’ Deputy Director of Public Relations, Marilyn Ogar, released a statement on Monday, saying the operatives acted on a petition that alleged an ongoing cloning activities of INEC Permanent Voters Card (PVC) by some unscrupulous persons with intent to hack into INEC data base, corrupt it and replace them with their own data.
Mohammed said: “The spokesperson for the SSS said the organization had put the building housing the Data Centre under surveillance, and that it only acted after it was convinced that ‘unwholesome activities’ were taking place. What hogwash!
“If indeed they put the place under surveillance, would they not have been able to establish that it is an APC Data Centre? Even if they were not sure, what prevents them from obtaining a court order permitting them to enter and search the building instead of carrying out a Gestapo-like operation? Are security agencies above the law?
“To highlight their crudity and lack of professionalism, they had to go and arrest one of the staffers who was not on duty just to get the password to the servers they vandalized and took away. This speaks volumes about the limitation of the DSS’ intelligence gathering ability.
”If they had broken into the Boko Haram computer, would they have gone to arrest Abubakar Shekau or any of his commanders to give them the password to it? Nigerians can now see why no progress has been made in using intelligence gathering to root out the evil Boko Haram.”
He also claimed that the DSS had become a tool of the PDP, and that the real reason the party’s office was invaded was to deprive it of its membership data base so it can no longer contact its members, and also to aid and abet the rigging of the 2015 elections by the PDP.
He continued: “With the membership data base now in their possession, it has become easy for them to collude with INEC to know which areas we are strong so they can scuttle the distribution of the Permanent Voters Cards there and, during the elections, to also deprive such areas of voting materials.”
