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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) says facial recognition systems like those being used by the Chinese Government to oppress the Uyghur population of Xinjiang province are already in use in Australia, and it has called for Australians to lobby for their prohibition.
EFA cites an ABC report from May saying: “Queensland Police deployed facial recognition during the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, ostensibly to protect against terrorism, but it immediately started being used for general policing.”
The ABC report said the technology had been unable to identify any of 16 high-priority targets whose facial images had been fed into it by the police. However, as we have reported elsewhere, vendors of facial recognition technology such as NEC are claiming very high success rates for their technology.
EFA said also that Stadiums Queensland was using facial recognition at its venues and cited a report from The Guardian, in June saying: “Perth Council is pushing ahead with its own facial recognition trial despite opposition from local residents.”
Also, according to EFA “Australian federal authorities are actively seeking to build a system, disturbingly called The Capability, to use facial recognition across all of Australia.”
Beware ‘The Capability’
The SMH reported in November 2018 that The Department of Home Affairs had been compiling the database of facial images for “The Capability” and said NSW police and crime agencies were 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.
In October 2017, the Prime Minister and state and territory leaders had agreed to establish a National Facial Biometric Matching Capability and signed an Intergovernmental Agreement on Identity Matching Services to “make it easier for security and law enforcement agencies to identify suspects or victims of terrorist or other criminal activity, and help to protect Australians from identity crime.”
However, as we reported earlier, plans for the legislation were stalled by the May Federal Election.
Meanwhile EFA says the justifications for use of the technology are the same as those coming from the Chinese government.
“It’s justified as being about terrorism, but that’s just a word used to stop people thinking about what’s actually going on,” Jackson said.
“It’s really about using state power to abuse vulnerable groups. “And it’s all happening without any community consultation or debate. These systems are just being imposed on us, in secret.
“With the Australian government already going so far as to raid journalists for exposing government misdeeds, and refusing to rule out prosecuting them for crimes, it’s easy to see how these systems will be abused.”
Bans called for
She said Australians should immediately call for all facial recognition systems in Australia to be removed. “All facial recognition projects should be halted, and no more should be started.”
EFA said other jurisdictions, such as San Francisco in the USA, are already banning the use of facial recognition systems.
Earlier this month Digital Rights Watch wrote to more than 400 local government authorities around Australia, raising concerns with surveillance operations and asking them to sign on to the Cities for Digital Rightsinitiative.
Cities for Digital Rights was launched by Barcelona, Amsterdam and New York City with the support of the United Nations Human Settlements Program. It is a global coalition of city councils that have pledged: “privacy, freedom of expression and democracy must be incorporated by design into digital platforms starting with locally-controlled digital infrastructures and services.”
