In May, Federal Justice Minister Michael Keenan announced a plan to work toward a National Facial Biometric Matching Capability. It's since become known simply as 'the Capability'. The lead agency is the Attorney-General's Department (the AGD) — that is, the very same department frustrating many in the telecommunications industry with its implementation of data retention.
The Capability is not the product of an open and consultative process. This lack of transparency is concerning, as the project has privacy implications for nearly all Australians. If you have a passport or a driver's licence, it affects you.
Yet five months after the program was announced, we've been told very little about the Capability. There's no dedicated government website, webpages or fact sheets. Despite this dearth of information, the government expects the Capability to be operating by mid-2016.
What little we know — beyond two government media releases — has been gleaned from responses to Senator Ludlam's questions at Senate Estimates in May and last week, and reporting by a few specialist tech journalists, Crikey and Lateline.
In September, Keenan announced that the Federal Government is spending $18.5 million to establish the Capability. This announcement also revealed:
the Capability will initially provide one-to-one image-based verification service among Commonwealth agencies;
a one-to-many image-based identification service will follow to allow law enforcement and security agencies to match one photograph of an unknown person against many photographs contained in government records to help establish their identity; and
the government is also working with the states and territories to explore the scope for their police and road agencies to participate in the Capability.
We've been told that the facial images, over 100 million of them, will not be stored centrally. Katherine Jones, the AGD's deputy secretary for national security and criminal justice, informed Senate Estimates in May that the Capability is being established as a 'hub and spoke' system.
We later learned in response to a question on notice, that the Capability will also have the scope to scan CCTV images or stills. At a Senate Estimates hearing last week, Senator Ludlam elicited some further details, including that it is possible images from social media could be included.
Representatives from the AGD informed the hearing that they were undertaking privacy impact assessments in consultation with federal and state privacy commissioners.
Unfortunately, the track record on privacy impact assessments is not reassuring. In August, Lateline reported that there were no proper privacy impact assessments undertaken concerning almost 90 per cent of the