They don’t give up, do they?
The Federal Government is determined to stickybeak into the lives of Australian citizens and is hoping to open the door into their privacy via targeting welfare recipients with controversial face matching technology. The case they are putting forward is that the technology would be “helpful” for people on welfare in times of crisis, such as in the case of natural disaster as well as victims of domestic violence. But once they have access to those on welfare, it is only a short jump to extending the system to all Australians.
The Department of Human Services has backed the introduction of a national facial recognition database to link government agencies. In a submission to the Federal Government, the Department indicated that it was “particularly interested” in using Facial Verification Services on its “vulnerable customers” for instance, those affected by disasters such as bush fires, homeless people and victims in domestic violence situations who may have lost, or be unable to access, ID documents.
The Department was referring to the “Identity Matching Services Bill 2019” which was introduced to Parliament early this year and recently rejected by a government-controlled intelligence committee, which raised concerns about the technology being used for mass surveillance. And rightly so. Prior to the availability of this technology, the Department was able to offer help to those caught up in situations where they required special assistance, so the claim they need to introduce it now in order to help people just does’t hold up.
In order to collect the facial biometric data, the database would scrape photos from drivers’ licences, from passports and from visa documents. From any document at all that has photo ID. This would then allow various government departments, as well as some private organisations, to compare images. This means those on the target list would have no say on their image being taken and it would not be long before the photos of all citizens with a drivers’ licence, passport or whatever, welfare recipient or not, would be scraped because there are those currently within the government, namely Peter Dutton, who want that back door open to provide access into the lives of all Australians and he/they will employ every lame excuse in the book to try and get this through Parliament, because once they do, they will extend it to encompass the entire population. It is unnecessarily invasive and a disgusting misuse of power.
According to the Home Affairs submission though, face biometric technology “has the potential to replace this manual process” and would also “strengthen the accuracy of identity confirmation against photo identity documents… and therefore reduce the risk of incorrect matching.” Sorry, but I’m not buying that either.
Cassandra Goldie, chief of the Australian Council of Social Services, rightly commented “No one was asked for their permission to do this. When people had their photos taken for drivers’ licences, they had no idea the images might one day be shared with Centrelink.” And that’s the thing. No one was told and whether they would grant permission, or not, for this to happen has never come up. Dr Goldie also noted “There are serious risks that widespread use of facial recognition… could be used in future to track people’s movements.” And again, no one will be told should it ever come to that.
Seriously though, why would anyone give their permission to allow the government to potentially track their every move? But more importantly, why should the government have that option? It is completely unnecessary to have “eyes” on every person in the country and as far as “national security” goes, the various police departments already have their methods for keeping tabs on criminal suspects and other specific persons of interest. Anything outside of surveillance on those specific elements is just plain fishing, and nothing can justify that.
This technology is not about national security. It is not about helping the “vulnerable”. It is about one man’s desire to invade the lives of ordinary Australians so he can play God. Fortunately, to date, he has failed to get the votes to get it passed through Parliament.
Hopefully, he never will.