Kazakh Senate questions security of electronic tagging devices

Kazakhstani Senate has questioned the safety and security of electronic tagging devices, Tengrinews reports.

“The government is allocating a significant sum of money to purchase these devices for convicts on parole. How technically secure are these devices? Yesterday I read in the media about a person who was supposed to be serving his sentence in prison, but instead, he was freely flying from one Kazakhstani city to another attending to his business dealings. In this context, a question arises of how sturdy are these tracking devices? There are enough handymen for this kind of things in our country. Can there be cases when a device would be showing the location of a convict in one place, while he is in a totally different place committing crimes?” lawmaker Bektas Beknazarov said during the round table discussion at the Senate.

The Vice Minister of Interior Affairs Berik Bisenkulov informed that the Ministry had studied the international experience and allocated $13 million to purchase the electronic tracking devices. Any attempt to tweak the device will send a signal to the law enforcement authorities.

“We have thieves who break safety deposit boxes and computer hackers. How strong are these bracelets?” one of the lawmakers said doubtfully.

“Our mentality is not the same as that of the Europeans. People here are quite 'creative'. We cannot guarantee that we can come up with a solution to this problem,” Bisenkulov said in response.

"In Europe people think of ways to follow the law", one of the lawmakers noted, while here in Kazakhstan "people think of ways to bypass the law". “Yes, we have some 'talented' people, and so there are no guarantees. We will work and see how it goes in practice,” the Vice Minister said.

The lawmakers argued that the amount of money allocated to introduce the tagging devices was large, and the fact that the device did not guarantee a person would not take it off proved the whole project unreliable.

The Ministry of the Interior Affairs explained that it had conducted a thorough research and found that nowhere in the world one gives a 100% guarantee for the bracelets to remain intact. Similar tracking devices were introduced in Russia 3 years ago. In the beginning there were some issues with the devices and people were trying to get rid of them, but in the end, the issues were solved.

Convicts and individuals under administrative supervision, according to Meiram Ayubayev of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, will protect their devices because in a case of a violation, the individual is returned to prison.

Reporting by Renat Tashkinbayev, writing by Gyuzel Kamalova