The Election Commission (EC) has imposed a series of ‘severe’ restrictions on officials to prevent inclusion of foreigners in the electoral roll and curb corruption related to the National Identity Card (NID). Restrictions are mainly imposed on the use of computers and mobile phones.
EC officials said that the EC has not been successful in earlier efforts to prevent inclusion of foreigners, especially Rohingyas, in the voter list and to prevent them from obtaining NIDs. Besides, there have been cases of unethical NID correction of many people without proper documents. On several occasions dishonest employees and even a deputy secretary have been dismissed. Many have been fired. One issue that emerged in most of the investigations at that time was that the officers in charge were not using their devices properly.
Therefore, the restrictions have been imposed so that such mistakes do not happen unknowingly in the future.
According to the instructions, the officials who have accounts in CMS (Card Management System) have been informed in advance through letters to be aware of their respective users. User ID, Password and OTP (One Time Password) are required to login to the CMS.
Security of your CMS account is your responsibility and any account holder is responsible for the activities done from their account so follow the steps below to protect your account from compromise.
1. You must change your account password at least once a month. The password must be long. Password must be a combination of characters, digits, special characters, upper case. No mobile number, child name, 12345678, 87654321, 11223344, spouse name etc. can be used as password.
2. The CMS password cannot be saved in the browser of your computer, that is, if you do not ask for the password every time you log in, then you must understand that the password is saved in the browser. Browser history should be deleted at least once a month.
3. While typing your password, you cannot type your password in front of any staff or other officer of your office.
4. Any other staff or officer should never be allowed to do any work on the computer from which the CMS is logged on. Because in this the control of that computer can be taken remotely by that officer/employee or any spyware software can be installed to steal the password.
5. In the computer where CMS is used, you should regularly check whether any other software is running on that computer without your knowledge or not by going to Task Manager. Any such notice should be brought to the notice of the ICT Division, Field-specific Technical Division of NID.
6. The OTP comes on your mobile so you must enter the password on your mobile. If the mobile password is shared with any officer/staff of the office, the OTP can be stolen and login to the CMS.
7. Care should be taken while leaving your mobile in the washroom, meeting, senior officer’s room. Because one second is enough time to steal the mobile OTP.
8. While setting the password on the mobile, select ‘Don’t Show notifications at all’, so that no one can read any SMS when the mobile is locked.
9. Password can be stolen by saving CMS password in mobile, writing it in diary.
10. In most cases, user compromise is seen through trusting the officials/staff of your office, so you have to be careful about password theft, OTP theft, knowing the mobile lock pattern, etc. from your office officials/staff.
In this regard, NID Director General AKM Humayun Kabir said that if someone’s password is stolen, the concerned officer should take responsibility.
EC’s NID server currently has information of 11 crore 91 lakh 51 thousand 440 citizens. Besides, there are 1 million Rohingya servers. NID is given by adding new voters to this server. Again, the information stored here is modified in view of the citizens’ requests. However, many people adopt unethical methods in this work.
