Law Council president calls for safeguards to prevent disproportionate uses of the technology and warns against ‘creep towards broad social surveillance’

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

People who litter or jaywalk could be caught using facial recognition technology if the broad powers proposed by Peter Dutton’s home affairs department are not limited, the Law Council has warned.

At a parliamentary inquiry hearing on Thursday the Law Council president, Morry Bailes, will warn that facial recognition could lead to a full “social credit” system of government surveillance and called for safeguards to prevent “illegitimate and disproportionate uses” of the technology.

The warning comes after the Victorian government threatened to pull out of the proposed facial recognition system because the identity-matching services bill expands Dutton’s powers beyond what was agreed by state governments and allows access to information by the private sector and local governments.

In October the Council of Australia Governments agreed to give federal and state police real-time access to passport, visa, citizenship and driver’s licence images for a wide range of criminal investigations through a system to be run by the home affairs department.

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In his opening statement to the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security, seen by Guardian Australia, Bailes will warn that giving government agencies the ability to identify a face in a crowd could result in CCTV footage being used to prosecute “low-level unlawful conduct”.

“Clearly, provision of such capability has been determined by government to be desirable to facilitate detection of would-be terrorists scoping a site for a potential terrorist attack,” he says.

“But that very same identity-matching capability might also be used for a range of activities that Australian citizens regard as unacceptable.”

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The Law Council wants the bill to clearly limit the legitimate and proportionate uses of the face-matching database, for the line to be “consistently applied” and added accountability measures to check proper usage is “independently verifiable”.

“If that line can creep towards broad social surveillance such as ... [the] use of the system to detect and fine jaywalkers or litterers, that line can also creep further to a full social credit style system of government surveillance of Australian citizens,” he says.

Bailes says the government has overstated the extent to which it is necessary and reasonable to limit the right to privacy in order to achieve more efficient data-sharing practices.

He argues that relying on the idea citizens have consented to identity-matching is problematic because government services “are required to participate fully in communities and [are] therefore essential in practice”.

The Law Council stated that reasonable and proportionate uses of the technology would include law enforcement to protect Australia’s national security, community safety and road safety.

The home affairs department submitted that the bill would allow it to help prevent identity crime, which affects 5% of Australians and is estimated to cost $2.2bn a year.

“Identity crime is also a key enabler of serious and organised crime, including terrorism,” the submission said.

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But in addition to invoking the most serious offences, the department also acknowledged that the systems would be used for “the provision of more secure and accessible government and private-sector services” and “improving road safety through the detection and prosecution of traffic offences”.



In its submission the Victorian government warned citizens may not be adequately informed that information they provide to get a driver’s licence, including biometric data, could be “reused for other law enforcement purposes”.

The Victorian submission said the states had agreed that the private sector would not be given access to the facial verification and identity data-sharing services.

But the bill did not “contain such a restriction, allowing non-government entities to use all identity-matching services” if they met certain conditions, it said.

The Victorian government submission also complained that providing identity-matching services to local government authorities “goes beyond what was agreed to”.