via Moyo reacts to Baba Jukwa scandal 10/05/2014 NewZimbabwe
Minister Jonathan Moyo has taken a cautious approach to strong beliefs some elements within the country’s intelligence were working in cahoots with two South African based Zimbabwean journalists who were running the popular Baba Jukwa Facebook page that has been spilling Zanu PF secrets.
NewZimbabwe.com yesterday broke the story and published email communications, pictures and a video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ex3a9CAXws – showing how unknown hackers broke into the pair’s emails and unmasked Mxolisi Ncube and Mkhululi Chimoio as the characters that have been running the page. Baba Jukwa has, since last year, been posing as a disgruntled Zanu PF top politician who was dishing out party secrets.
The Facebook page amassed hundreds of thousands of followers among Zimbabweans and was even more popular towards the July 31, 2013 elections. But reacting to revelations, Moyo said he would not take the alleged involvement of CIO agents at face value, insisting the internet hacking was rampant. Moyo said he was relieved the unmasking of the real characters behind the scandal was not the work of any disgruntled Zanu PF politburo member contrary wide belief this was an inside job.
“While the claim that the anonymous hackers who have unmasked Baba Jukwa worked with unnamed intelligence services should be taken with some grain of salt given that Internet hacking has become an art form even among high school kids, it should be said that there is no unknown on the Internet. Surfing the Internet is no different from driving on any highway,” Moyo said in a statement. “There’s no permanent privacy or secrecy there about your car or anything inside it not least because you can be stopped and your car can be searched. Everything on the Internet is either known or can be known sooner or later. This is because the Internet is surfed by users whose access codes are based on passwords that can be decoded or websites that can be broken into in the same way that cars on the roads out there can be broken into or stolen with the consequence of breaching the privacy of their users or owners.
As such, the least said about how the now busted Baba Jukwa was actually unmasked the better. “The conspicuous fact with far-reaching implications is that we now all know that Baba Jukwa was a fake Zanu-PF insider who claimed to be a member of the party’s politburo when he most probably does not even know where the Zanu-PF politburo actually meets.”
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