On Wednesday September 9 the Australian government, as one of its weekly National Security announceables, announced increased funding for The National Facial Biometric Matching Capability[1]. This technology gives law enforcement agencies the ability to use images that were captured for the creation of drivers licenses, passports, and so on, to cross-reference and identify people via CCTV. While it is being pitched as a great tool for catching terrorists, we fear that this technology could be re-purposed into a means of putting the entire population under real-time surveillance, and has the potential for false positives to pull innocent people into cases they played no part in.

The Pirate Party calls upon the new Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to do away with the theatrics of weekly National Security announceables, which serve no purpose other than political point scoring. We also call on the government to change tack and stop the relentless march towards a police state in an attempt to wedge the ALP.

“Every few weeks the government launches another assault on our civil liberties and every week the ALP waves it through,” said Michelle Allen, Pirate Party candidate for the Canning By-Election. “Our basic rights are under bi-partisan assault in an effort to appear tough on terrorism and crime. Abbott continually attacked civil liberties as a tactic to wedge the ALP. It is time to say enough. We believe that Australians should be treated as citizens not suspects. We call on Malcolm Turnbull to stop the attacks on our freedoms and to restore our civil liberties that have withered under the Abbott government.”

The FBI runs a similar facial recognition program in the United States, where about 20% of the searches return false positives. Such a high failure rate will lead to false accusations and innocent people being connected with crimes they had no part in. As with metadata retention, it isn’t clear what restrictions or steps to protect collected data will be taken so that individual’s details are not provided to organisations that should not have access.

“Facial recognition technology is far from accurate and there is a serious risk of innocent people being impacted by false positives. Whilst many of the proposed uses at the moment are sensible, such as checking identities to prevent identity theft, it is not clear what else it will be used for. If this technology gets coupled with CCTV and real-time tracking it risks becoming a panopticon, with the entire population being put under constant real-time surveillance,” she continued.

“A liberal democracy does not put the entire population under surveillance. The potential for misuse is enormous. There have been cases in the US of NSA agents putting love interests under surveillance[2]. We believe that any time law enforcement agencies wish to put anyone under surveillance or access their personal information held by other organisations, they should get a warrant.” Ms Allen concluded.

The dangers of such a system to democracy cannot be understated. Already the Queensland police have trialled facial recognition technology at the G20 protests[3], so questions are raised about the potential chilling effect such technology may have on the political participation of people now and in the future. The cost to our civil liberties are too great.

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-09/national-facial-recognition-system/6761266
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/24/nsa-analysts-abused-surveillance-systems
[3] http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4309519.htm, http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/g20-brisbane-covert-tactics-behind-security/story-fnmd7bxx-1227124407575