Addressing a press conference at the recent Botswana Democratic Party’s national congress in Tsabong, President Mokgweetsi Masisi claimed that the party doesn’t have technical capacity to unmask a bothersome Facebook account that calls itself France Museveni. Not so, says an expert in IT security who is familiar with Botswana’s ICT infrastructure. As a good many people, the expert believes that the page is actually administered by state intelligence operatives and exists solely to malign those who criticise Masisi.
In that regard, this source says that the issue of unmasking France Museveni by the state is irrelevant because France Museveni is the state itself. In service of the latter, the source makes the point that the page typically publishes highly confidential official information that could only have come from the state. In reference to the question that Masisi had to answer at the Tsabong press conference, the source says asking Masisi to uncover France Museveni is tantamount to asking him to expose an intelligence operation that he is part of.
A similar point to be made is that while Masisi said that the BDP would itself not be able to trace back the page to the source, he used “BDP” in a misleading fashion. He sought to differentiate the party from the government when the party is the government. The BDP may not have the resources to trace the source of posts on the France Museveni page but it controls a government that has such resources. However, speculation alone wouldn’t suffice, which is why the source’s expertise becomes more useful. He says that the first thing those attempting to unmask Museveni would need is basic information “about this character”, when the account was created, how it has been relaying information and its pattern for breaking news.
Thus far, France Museveni page is having a good run but traces of metadata – digital or otherwise – might spell doom for it. The page will certainly be linked to some other accounts, which can be isolated and meticulously mined for clues. These accounts will certainly be promoting content from France Museveni to other accounts and among them will be a sub-set that is doing this the most. If the France Museveni admin takes his own pictures, the digital metadata could also compromise his identity. Image-viewing applications can reveal properties of images (like date and time the original was taken, geo-location data as well as the model of the camera and its settings like exposure time and aperture value) that are downloaded to a computer. That information can then be co-related with other information in order to build a fuller, more accurate picture. However, that wouldn’t happen if the admin has disenabled the GPS-sensor.
France Museveni is certainly not an amateur and would certainly have taken the necessary precautions. Still, the admin might slip up and unwittingly make and give a clue that compromises his/her identity somehow. For example, everyone has verbal mannerisms that are peculiar to them. Following the example of President Sir Ketumile Masire’s grandson, love-struck urban and female youth visually set a scene with “picture this.”
The grandson, who works as a banker in London, spoke at Masire’s funeral in Kanye and set many young female hearts aflutter when he took to the podium. An international example is that Donald Trump whose habitual threats to unleash his riotous mob typically contain “the likes of which the world has never seen.” Behind the France Museveni page is a real person with unique verbal mannerisms that he uses in real-life personal interaction with other people. One day, someone will discern the similarity between the diction on the page and the way someone who could possibly be France Museveni speaks. At a more technical level, someone skilled in a very rare linguistic science called forensic linguistics can easily unmask France Museveni. Forensic linguists study dialect, grammar, sentence construction, phonetics and other linguistic elements to analyse written or recorded documents.
By striking a casual conversation with a suspect, a forensic linguist would be able to easily get the required answer within five minutes. However, as the IT expert points out, it would be extremely difficult to unmask Museveni if indeed the admin or admins are intelligence operatives. “Technically speaking, it’s not hard to track the character but it becomes harder when it’s an intelligence operative or a group of operatives as some suspect. If the group has been resourced with highly sophisticated spy agency tools, it would be hard to trace it.
In the field of hacking and cyber security, you are taught how to penetrate or compromise your target’s systems and clean your tracks without being traced back. There are things like cloning and spoofing IP addresses and encrypted communication that are used to confuse the would-be tracker,” the IT expert says. As to whether a private sector entity or ordinary person can attempt to trace the page back to the source, the expert says that while that is possible, the quite prohibitive cost would be a hindrance. He adds that the trace might also bring such parties into conflict with the government because there is a threshold they would breach and attract the attention of state intelligence. Most relevant with regard to the latter aspect is the registration of a Facebook account. The registration process requires an email account or mobile phone number to which a password is sent.
An email account will certainly be linked to an Internet protocol (IP) address, which is a unique address that identifies a device on the Internet. An IP address allows information to be sent between devices on a network and contains location information. The mobile phone number is registered with a carrier using one’s national card number. However, both the IP address and phone number can be spoofed, especially if intelligence operatives are involved. Some victims of the France Museveni page have posited theories of who the admin is. One is John Kula, a freelance commercial pilot and associate of former president Ian Khama. In March this year, the page accused Kula of being part of a clandestine operation to finance terrorism. The page alleged that Kula periodically smuggles millions of pula from Lanseria Airport in South Africa to the Sir Seretse Khama International Airport.
In refuting these allegations, Kula expressed deeply held belief that President Masisi was Museveni. His explanation was that the page tends to be inactive when Masisi is on sick leave or extremely busy. He added that that was the case in January this year when the president was on sick leave. Kula also proposed that it is by grand design that the writing on the France Museveni page tends to be muddled and grammatically imperfect. “That is just Masisi pretending that he can’t use proper English but when you engage him, he uses proper English and a polished style of debating you see in politicians,” claimed Kula adding that if the government didn’t want the France Museveni page to publish posts, “it would long have stopped it but that has not happened.”
In a defamation case before the High Court, Specially-elected MP, Unity Dow, has alleged that a senior official at the Office of the President, Botho Seboko, is the admin of the France Museveni page.
