Smartmatic decline direction by SCOK to allow Raila team access to servers
The company that was contracted by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to supply technology for the August 9 General Election has declined the direction by the Supreme Court to allow Raila Odinga’s team to access the servers.
Smartmatic International Holding b.v claimed they want to protect the company’s security status. They further claimed that providing full access to servers hosting Form 34C would infringe its intellectual property rights
“As per your request regarding the provision of image of national tallying centre servers, we would like to clarify that such images contain software owned and copyrighted by Smartmatic and thus IP protected. Providing full access would infringe on our intellectual property rights”, reads the letter signed by the company’s Managing Director F. Gunnik.
He added that allowing access to their information to a third party would also render it insecure for any future use.
However, lawyer Philip Murgor, representing Azimio la Umoja One Kenya presidential candidate Raila Amolo, yesterday complained to the court that IEBC had refused to comply with the court order by denying their agents access to all the eight servers.
“IEBC failed to provide forensic images of all the servers. They provided limited access to Server Five and we observed multiple deletions. We suspect the delay and non-compliance could be to delete vital data and when time runs out they may provide irrelevant information,” Murgor said.
