Ad­dress­ing a cer­e­mo­ny to com­mem­o­rate the han­dover of com­put­er equip­ment by Huawei to the Care­nage Po­lice Youth Club in his con­stituen­cy, the Prime Min­is­ter out­lined an am­bi­tious vi­sion for T&T. He called on the coun­try to em­brace tech­nol­o­gy say­ing that the world has trans­formed and T&T need­ed to keep up to stay in the game. He not­ed the pos­i­tive ben­e­fits that such a trans­for­ma­tion would have on the coun­try’s pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and se­cu­ri­ty as it moved to­wards the goal of a cash­less so­ci­ety.

He not­ed that the Min­istry of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion was a key part of the gov­ern­ment’s plan for a new dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture and re­port­ed that all min­istries were grad­u­al­ly digi­tis­ing their in­for­ma­tion data­bas­es and that gov­ern­ment op­er­a­tions would im­prove as they be­came more de­pen­dent on tech­nol­o­gy.

Whilst we con­grat­u­late the Prime Min­is­ter for ar­tic­u­lat­ing such a lofty vi­sion, he missed an op­por­tu­ni­ty to up­date the pub­lic on the dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion project’s progress by iden­ti­fy­ing some of the tan­gi­ble re­sults that had been achieved so far. It was a galling omis­sion giv­en the ev­i­dence that sug­gests the coun­try has a huge moun­tain to climb. Who can we trust to un­der­take this ex­er­cise? Which agency has the tech­ni­cal and man­age­r­i­al ca­pac­i­ty to de­liv­er this am­bi­tious agen­da, TSTT?

Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies around the world are at the fore­front of dig­i­tal change. In­deed, the most ubiq­ui­tous de­vice that has led ac­cess to the in­ter­net and placed the world's in­for­ma­tion at the fin­ger­tips of most cit­i­zens is the cell phone. Sta­tis­ti­ca es­ti­mat­ed in 2021 that there were 7.1 bil­lion mo­bile phone users which would rise to 7.49 bil­lion users by 2025. Mo­bile own­er­ship and in­ter­net us­age are fore­cast­ed to grow as mo­bile tech­nolo­gies be­come more af­ford­able and avail­able and cur­rent­ly ac­count for 60 per cent of all in­ter­net traf­fic.

Giv­en these facts, one would ex­pect that the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT) would have been pre­pared for the in­evitable cy­ber­at­tack which it now ad­mits took place on Oc­to­ber 9. The pub­lic re­la­tions re­sponse to the at­tack has been poor. Since the pub­lic re­la­tions as­pect ought to have been the eas­i­est, one shud­ders to imag­ine the qual­i­ty of the tech­ni­cal re­sponse. An of­fi­cial pub­lic apol­o­gy from the com­pa­ny’s man­age­ment was made to its “val­ued cus­tomers” in a full-page ad­ver­tise­ment on No­vem­ber 11, a full month lat­er.

Pri­vate com­men­ta­tors alert­ed the pub­lic on so­cial me­dia ad­vis­ing of the nec­es­sary pre­cau­tions long be­fore the com­pa­ny even ac­knowl­edged the breach. The Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties first re­as­sured the pub­lic that re­ports of a da­ta breach were un­true, then re­tract­ed and or­dered an in­de­pen­dent in­ves­ti­ga­tion. Who ad­vised him that there was no breach? Some­one in man­age­ment or mem­bers of the Board? Do they still en­joy his con­fi­dence? If not, what is next?

Whilst TSTT is not part of the gov­ern­ment’s op­er­a­tions, it is owned by the Gov­ern­ment and some of the gov­ern­ment’s da­ta traf­fic will in­evitably be trans­mit­ted over TSTT’s pub­lic net­work. The da­ta breach can­not sim­ply be over­looked and swept un­der the car­pet. How can the pub­lic be as­sured of the com­pa­ny’s cred­i­bil­i­ty, or the min­is­ter’s, in the face of this poor ef­fort? Per­son­al da­ta is akin to gold in a tech­no­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven world.