Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

Last week, I got information and notification that I (Cdr Idd Salim – not related entities) was banned and blacklisted by Safaricom Kenya Limited and should not be seen physically or in a proposal as a service provider, cook, guard or even a potential husband to ANY Safaricom employees.

This was hugely because of my uncensored and non boot-licking blogs about the way a fictitious Kenyan company called Safaricon [dont know why Safaricom thinks they actually are Safaricon.] lures Kenyan developers into meetings and steals their ideas, implements them and commerializes them without even a rebate or a simple Sambaza to the inventor.

I spoke to Mwaniki and he told me : ‘Achana na Saf. They are just a jogoo la shamba with a measly 15M simcards sold and jut over 6M active subscribers. On the global scene, they are a micro-player. Think Global, my small brother. They cant match Zain’s 70M+ Subscribers.’. I smiled. But since I don’t like making enemies of any size, shape or color, I am here to apologize for the confusion.

Actually, I think Safaricom is the best company in Kenya and I have no beef with them. My fiction stories on Safcon will, however, continue.

The only beef I have with the mighty Safaricom that we all love and awe at, however, is this sad story:

In Dec last year, I remember, there was a certain Sally LM who was helping me solve a case where  my Safcom numbers was being tracked and all the SMSes I sent given to my S.O. and all my Voice calls sent to her as email attachments. Every day, after a tiring day hassling to pay rent and at least afford grocery, I would reach home for a FBI interrogation on who I was talking to and why I called a certain lady, ‘Darling’ in one of my SMSes. Sally LM was very cooperative until the 18th Dec. She stopped when we had finally cornered the Safaricom employee who was selling my call records to my S.O.

Safaricom, at first, categorically denied that they actually store ALL audio and text for all its subscribers. The reason, from Sally, was ‘technical’. Once I told her I knew what a mouse was and could at least double-click without stuttering, she explained that the volume of calls ‘was too big and the data storage capacity at Safaricom would not be enough’.

So I called my good old big brother at UTL and he told me that BY LAW, all Mobile Companies store data and this data is easily accessible. According to Vodafone, call data is stored for 6 months and all internet data for 3 years. The main reason is for crime revention. In normal modus operandi, Safaricom would  would want a Subpoena if records are requested for an account or telephone that you do not own [maybe requested by CID or police]. It is also a CRIMINAL and sue-able offence for someone to sell/buy data for a number they don’t own.

I did some maths and found that using the 13 kbps Full rate GSM pipe [Like Zain do for the clearest calls], a minute of a voice call would be 97.5 Kilobytes big. I stand corrected, but this means that if ALL the 15M Safcom sim cards were to be put in actual phones and all made calls there would be 7.5 Million dialogs using 697.37 Gigabytes of data per hour [A mere 16.736 TB per day]. With a Terastation Live 20 TB Sata harddisk of 10K rpm retailing at USD 200, It is hard to imagine a MSP would fail to build a data center to store this for 1 year+. But Who am I to argue.

Unfortunately, this being Kenya, all one needed to access my call records was just one disgruntled/under-paid/bored/corruptible Safaricom employee and all my records were public property. MTN Uganda did a better job when my calls were being tracked and an Employee called Emma Mudolla was fired in relation to this.

So, Working with Sally,  I made a prank call to one of my should-not-call-according-to-her numbers and when I was drilled on that after getting home that evening, I smiled. Safaricom system tracks who accesses client calls and at what time. So I emailed Sally and told her to check. Then the strangest thing happened. Until today, Sally no longer takes my calls or responds to my emails. Why Sally stopped helping me when we had cornered the snitch is still a mystery.

It would really mean alot if Safaricom could help me in eliminating this low-life pest. In Zain, A friend of mine had such issues and the snitches were flushed like the ectoplasm they were.

Back to code.

-Salim, Idd.