National facial ID on way
CRIME fighting will be supercharged by a Home Affairs facial recognition system that will be linked to every Australian driver’s licence within 18 months, enabling rapid manhunts and even identifing people at risk of disease.
Millions of driver’s licences will start to be loaded within months, allowing biometric comparisons of facial images in a new database.
A select group of state police are now being trained to use the Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution, which could hold up to 30 million individual licences, including firearms, fishing and proof of age cards. Every driver’s licence is expected to be in the system by the end of next year.
The Turnbull Government will have to get new laws through the Parliament for the system to be approved. While all states and territories agreed to the identity matching services in October 2017, some civil liberatarians have raised concerns about privacy issues.
The crime-fighting tool will give national and state law enforcement agencies another weapon in the fight against terrorism, identity crime and serious crime, plus help health authorities concerned about a public outbreak of communicable diseases.
If a crime has been committed that carries a jail sentence of three years’ or more, such as kidnapping or rape, an image captured by CCTV or another source will be able to be run through the database to identity the suspect.
It will bring up a “gallery” of up to 20 suspects and police, specially trained in using the system, will determine who the person is likely to be. Only a select number of law enforcement officials will have access to the technology.
Government agencies can now verify information on documents such as driver’s licenses and passports by using the Document Verification Service (DVS).
But the DVS, which is a name-based checking tool, cannot detect when a fraudulent photograph is used with legitimate details on identity documents.
The Government believes identity-matching will also make it harder for people to escape speeding fines, losing demerit points or their licence because people will be found out if they fraudulently have multiple licences.