Facial recognition: what could possibly go wrong?

If he's in town Rowan Atkinson, left, could possibly be mistaken for Sam Dastyari.

COAG met yesterday, the Prime Minister and the premiers of the states and chief ministers of the territories with Tasmanian premier, Will Hodgman, only allowed in after facial recognition technology was used as no one really knew what he looked like.

When the day came to an end, they all stood around backslapping for the cameras having agreed to everything the Prime Minister had placed on the agenda, including the creation of a national database of drivers’ licence photographs from across the country to give some muscle to photo recognition technology and continue the creeping sense of state surveillance on the citizenry.

It was a brief moment of political unity with Labor and Liberal leaders speaking as one.

How do we feel about this? The idea of a national voluntary non-binding postal survey didn’t get a look in this time, funnily enough, so we’re not quite sure about the national mood but it was one of those moments where clearly government didn’t give a damn what people thought.

Welcome to the roving eye of the surveillance state which will examine each and every one of us when we deign to go out in public and declare, ‘too fat’, ‘kinda cute but big nose’, all the way to ‘I bet he’s got a nice personality.’

If the use of facial recognition technology was restricted to use in the federal parliament, it could be highly amusing. Imagine the guys behind the consoles.

“Oh look, Rowan Atkinson is in town.”

“No, that’s Sam Dastyari.”

“It’s a giant potato, almost perfectly spherical. Peter Dutton?”

“I dunno. But I sure could go a packet of chips right now.”

“Man, turn off the infra-red.”

“It’s not on infra red. That’s just Barnaby Joyce.”

The obvious weakness in facial recognition analysis would involve the appearance of Labor’s faceless men. They’d be invisible, sneak right up on you, Malcolm. Look out!

Of course it won’t be limited to the parliament. It extends to everyone, well, everyone with a driver’s licence and/or a passport and that’s much pretty much all of us.

It comes on top of national data retention laws that allow federal and state authorities to access information on what you were looking at on the net, who you were emailing and what about and geo-tracking technology which if you carry a mobile phone and 95 per cent of us do, your exact location at any given time is known.

In the case of data retention, the data is stored by your internet provider or telco and is made available to a range of government agencies without a warrant.

Of graver concern is that your image, all doleful and grim for the camera, is to be stored in a database owned and managed by the federal government.

Forgive me for being cynical but in the recent past, the government has not always been the most cautious about data. It sources data storage from private companies and seems to be technology illiterate when it comes to deciding what manner of storage and how it should be accessed.

For example, the Australian Taxation Office’s Storage Area Network (SAN) crashed late last year. It laid the blame squarely at the feet of the provider, Hewlett Packard. While the ATO isn’t saying what data leaked or was permanently damaged, the quibbling over compensation continues.

More well known is the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ network meltdown during the 2016 Census. What data was lost is again not fully understood. The alleged culprit in this instance was IBM.

If this shiny new SAN containing your and my happy snaps is hacked by any one of the world’s internet ne’er-do-wells, the consequences could be catastrophic. In other words, you can get a new password and new accounts but you can’t get a new face. Not unless you know some bikies who work cheap.

The Prime Minister was out and about yesterday on the media circuit huffing and puffing about the need for a nationwide photo recognition scheme and worked tirelessly to sell it on the back of counter terrorism.

On A Current Affair, Malcolm Turnbull went as far as to suggest that increasing national surveillance powers was a step towards a utopian future where everyone was free as a bird.

“Well, national security enables us to be free; it is security that keeps us free. The terrorists want to take away our freedom; they want to take away our freedom to live. They want to take away our freedom to go about our lives the way we always do. So security goes hand-in-hand with freedom,” Turnbull said.

Facial recognition software is not a blow for civil liberties.

This is at odds with his comments in December last year. “We must not be cowed by the terrorists. We will continue to go about our lives as we always have. What these criminals seek to do is to kill. But they also seek to frighten us, to cow us into abandoning our Australian way of life.”

Here was the PM in May, saying virtually the same thing. “We will not be cowed by terrorists. We will not be intimidated by them. We will not change our way of life …”

And again in July, “We say to these killers to these terrorists that seek to change the way we live, we will not be cowed, we won’t change the way we live, we won’t stop going out at night, we won’t stop enjoying ourselves. We will defy you and defeat you,”

All right. The lesson here is never get in the way of a PM battling in the polls and playing the old national security card. The reality is this shiny new technology will be used essentially for general law enforcement. For counter-terrorism not so much. How do we know this? Because that is what the Intergovernmental Agreement on Identity Matching Services, cheerfully signed by the PM, state premiers and territory chief ministers yesterday, says.

This great big step into Big Brother-dom is about offering police more utility in investigating corporate fraud than actual terrorism.

You cannot be a conservative and support this. You simply can’t. A conservative, by definition, believes change occurs organically, not by legislative instrument or government action.

You could be a socialist, a communist, a fascist or in support of some other ghastly type of police state. If you do support this, you most definitely are a statist, in favour of big government and a well-resourced, intrusive police apparatus.

Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

You cannot have it both ways. You can be for civil liberties or you can, as the Prime Minister says, be cowed.