Surprisingly the announcement by Minister of Justice, Michael Keenan, a little over a week ago, was not widely reported by the mainstream media, despite concerns about the FVS' impact on individual privacy.
The first phase of the platform allows the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to access the images on citizenship applications held by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.
Other types of images such as visa and passport photos will be added over time, with the government also talking to states and territories to bring driver licence images into the Facial Verification System.
Next year the system will be expanded to include identification of "unknown persons", to assist investigations of serious offences. Minister Keenan said access in this case would be restricted to "a limited number of users in specialist areas".
Access will also gradually be expanded to other police forces and security agencies such as ASIO and Defence. The federal Attorney-General's Department is the lead agency for managing access.
In short the answer is yes, but not immediately.
A Senate inquiry into the Facial Verification System heard late last year that the system could eventually include non-official photos like those taken from Facebook and Instagram.
At the time, Greens Senator, Scott Ludlam, asked if there was any law that could prevent the system from ingesting photographs from publicly available sites, like Facebook.
Andrew Rice from the Attorney-General's Department told the Senate:
It's possible that still images out of these kinds of environments could be put into the system. That would be a choice for the users of the system."
He also said it would be possible to source still images from things like CCTV, but that the poor quality of the images would potentially make them unviable.
The justifaction for the facial verification system (FVS) is that name-based checking and document-based checking is no longer reliable enough.
The Minister said the capability to share images was "necessary given the higher-quality fraudulent identity documents being produced by criminals."
According to Minister Keenan the system will be used to identify unknown suspects of serious crimes like terrorism, money-laundering, murder and child sexual exploitation.
"FVS provides the ability to match a person's photo against an image on one of their existing government records.
We know that people previously convicted of terrorism offences in Australia have used false identities to assist in planning terrorist attacks. This includes purchasing ammunition and chemicals to make explosives and pre-paid mobile phones to communicate anonymously"
A Face Identification Service (FIS) is expected to commence in 2017 to help determine the identity of unknown persons. It will be used for investigations of serious offences by specialist officers.
Related Blogs
| VoicePlus solves enterprise mobility problems. We are a managed mobility service provider delivering cost savings and enabling agile, productive teams to Australian business. |