The New South Wales government has announced a multimillion-dollar investment to support the rollout of the National Facial Biometric Matching Capability
Announced as part of the state's 2018-19 Budget on Tuesday, NSW will be contributing AU$52.6 million over four years to the rollout of the biometric capability across New South Wales, enabling access to new face matching technology for law enforcement.
"This technology will increase the capability to identify suspects or victims of terrorist or other criminal activity, including identity crime," the Budget papers say.
The Australia-wide initiative will allow state and territory law enforcement agencies to have access to the country's new face matching services to access passport, visa, citizenship, and driver licence images from other jurisdictions.
The Face Verification Service (FVS) is a one-to-one image-based verification service that will match a person's photo against an image on one of their government records; while the Face Identification Service (FIS) is a one-to-many, image-based identification service that can match a photo of an unknown person against multiple government records to help establish their identity.
The Australian government in February introduced two Bills into the House of Representatives [1] that would allow for the creation of the system to match photos against identities of citizens stored in various federal and state agencies: The Identity-matching Services Bill 2018 (IMS Bill) and the Australian Passports Amendment (Identity-matching Services) Bill 2018.
The pair of Bills make good on an agreement reached at COAG[2] in October by state and territory leaders to introduce a national system allowing for biometric matching.
Access to the FIS will be limited to police and security agencies, or specialist fraud prevention areas within agencies that issue passports, and