This appeared last Sunday.
Surveillance state: NSW intensifies citizen tracking
4 November 2018 — 6:25am
NSW police and crime agencies are preparing to use a new national facial recognition system to rapidly match pictures of people captured on CCTV with their driver’s licence photo, to detect criminals and identity theft.
Under new laws the federal and state governments will be able to access data and photos from passports, driver licences, and visas for a national facial recognition system called the “National Facial Biometric Matching Capability”
The Department of Home Affairs has been compiling the database for what is known as “The Capability". Unlike the controversial My Health Record, people can’t opt out of their details being included in the system.
The NSW Government has allocated $52.6 million over four years to support The Capability. The NSW Minister for Counter-Terrorism David Elliott said it would enable authorities “to quickly identify a person of interest to help keep the community safe."
The system was signed off in October last year by state and territory governments. Some now need to pass their own laws to authorise state government agencies like NSW Roads and Maritime Services to release photographs and other information to the new federal system. Half of the operation and maintenance costs will be shared by states and territories, on a population basis.
There are two parts to The Capability. A Face Verification Service (FVS), which is a one-to-one image-based match of a person’s photo against a government record such as a passport. This is already operational.
The second part is the Face Identification Service (FIS), which is a one-to-many, image match of an unknown person, such as a suspected criminal, against multiple government records to help establish their identity. Access to the FIS will be limited and was expected to come online this year.
A Department of Home Affairs spokeswoman said the laws to allow identity matching services to be used for "identity or community protection activities" are currently the subject of a Parliamentary Joint Committee inquiry
Monash University Criminal Jurisprudence Professor Liz Campbell said in a submission to the inquiry The Capability breaches privacy rights by allowing collection, storage and sharing of personal details from innocent people who are not even suspected of an offence.
"This is compounded by the possibility of non-government entities accessing the identity matching services," Professor Campbell wrote. "Research into identity matching technology indicates that ethnic minorities and women are misidentified at higher rates than the rest of the population.
"[There are] significant concerns about the reliability or otherwise of its algorithms and the biases that can be inherent in them."
Professor Campbell referred to a facial recognition pilot scheme in Wales that finished this year with 91 per cent of matches incorrectly identifying innocent members of the public.
The Australian Capital Territory and Victoria have objected to The Capability as proposed by the federal government because they say it violates their local privacy and human rights laws.
More here:
All I can suggest is that you make sure any photo-id you are forced to have is a blurry as possible.
At the very least there should be public reporting as to how the system is actually being used, how accurate it is and so on. We are giving up a heck of a lot of privacy for the promise of trivially improved security.
David.
p.s. And in really late-breaking news the Wall Street Journal is reporting the Chinese have developed AI's that use gait to identify people whose face can't be seen. There is really no where to hide except on a wheelchair under a metal helmet!
D.
p.s. And in really late-breaking news the Wall Street Journal is reporting the Chinese have developed AI's that use gait to identify people whose face can't be seen. There is really no where to hide except on a wheelchair under a metal helmet!
D.
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