At this point, the security monitoring system in Kenya is more intricate and has more depth than the majority of people are aware of. People’s travels, phone conversations, and everyday routines are tracked with such remarkable accuracy that many individuals feel they have practically no privacy at all.
It is possible for security services such as the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and the National Intelligence Service (NIS) to track individuals with a high degree of accuracy, monitoring their movements to within a five-meter radius.
What is causing alarm is that they have proceeded without seeking a court order on a number of occasions. If they so choose, they may observe before they provide an explanation—or they can choose not to provide an explanation at all.
They do not even have to ask for permission from Safaricom or Airtel to do this. These agencies have the resources, the capacity, and the authority to circumvent telecommunications providers entirely, and in many cases, they may do so without obtaining court orders.
Following that, individuals start to feel frightened and consider using a kabambe or simple phone to conceal their activities. However, the reality of the situation is that it does not have a significant impact.
They can still track your location, send and receive messages, and monitor the individuals in your contact list. Fear can cause individuals to attempt to remove themselves from digital systems, but current monitoring is geared to follow trends rather than just keeping track of gadgets.
Even the most basic techniques won’t be able to hide you from view if the state has marked you as a target. It is regrettable that you do not have the option of opting out of near-perfect monitoring, particularly if you are someone who the state considers a target.
They could do it before cell phones, and they can still do it now. The moment that the state has someone in its sights, it is able to monitor their actions, relationships, and habits in a way that is similar to how a shadow follows someone.
Privacy becomes more of an illusion than an actual, tangible thing. The most important thing to remember is that the digital world in Kenya is much more closely watched than the majority of people believe it to be.
It is essential to remain watchful and aware of one’s surroundings. People continue to believe that surveillance is synonymous with ‘listening to calls’. That is the level of difficulty that is found in kindergarten.
Direct connections to core network signals (SS7/Diameter), IMSI catchers, legal intercept nodes on fibre backbones, and passive cell site simulators are the foundations of modern Kenyan SIGINT.
Those tools are not restricted to Safaricom or Airtel approval; they reside at the infrastructure layer and collect information in real time about location, call detail records, mobile-money transactions, and device fingerprints. However, the model is the true source of power, not the device itself.
A behavioural baseline is created by an agency before it ever relocates; this baseline includes your commute, your sleep-wake cycle, the people you encounter, the things you pay for, any addictions you may have, and even your stride or facial signatures on closed-circuit television (CCTV).
Your “digital twin” starts to be represented by that pattern. As soon as you commit an infraction, your first inclination is to run away or to go black. It is at this point when anomalies begin to appear in the model.
There is no need for the system to pursue a phone; it is capable of identifying human deviations and updating the net automatically. For this reason, it hardly makes a difference whether you use a kabambe or any other SIM card.
These platforms are more concerned with following probabilities and habits than they are with following metal and plastic. When you reach that level, the privacy of a gadget is no longer considered a feature; instead, it becomes an illusion that is contained inside a data web that is difficult to escape.