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Big Brother is Watching.

LIVE FACIAL RECOGNITION

Police forces in Western Australia have announced an expansion of live facial recognition technology capabilities, marking a new development in their use of biometric surveillance.

The technology in question will allow police to analyse faces in real time and compare them against a database of people they are ‘seeking to locate’, with the trial expanding existing infrastructure once traditionally confined to the CBD and surrounding locations.

Note, unlike the ABC headline above, this is not an ‘Australian first’. We will explore this later.

The expanded trial will initially involve a marked police vehicle equipped with live facial recognition cameras, deployed at major events and crowded public locations across Western Australia.

Unlike conventional CCTV systems, which primarily record footage for later review, live facial recognition is designed to identify individuals as they move through a monitored area.

WA Police have stated that the initial watchlist will focus on people of “specific policing interest”, including individuals with outstanding arrest warrants, registered child sex offenders (yeah right), and missing persons.

Authorities have emphasised that the technology is intended as an “investigative and public safety tool”, rather than a system designed to monitor the entire population.

Even though, by default, it will.

The expansion has prompted concerns from privacy advocates, who argue that the technology introduces a new level of surveillance because members of the public may have their faces analysed even when they are not suspected of any wrongdoing.

Critics have also raised questions about data retention, oversight, accuracy, and the potential for the technology to expand beyond its original purpose.

In addition, there is a growing prevalence of false matches produced by facial recognition systems across the world. A mistaken identification could lead to unnecessary police attention for an innocent person, particularly if safeguards are not robust.

The WA Police trial comes amid wider debate in Australia and overseas about the appropriate use of biometric technology in public spaces.

Governments and law enforcement agencies have increasingly explored facial recognition as technology has become more accessible, as the surveillance state expands.

Today, you will be lucky to go anywhere without some form of CCTV camera watching you – not just from police forces, but also from a plethora of retail and commercial settings.

Australia has become an Orwellian dystopia.

SURVEILLANCE STATE

In the post-9/11 era, advanced models of monitoring have been deployed on everyday citizens under the guise of ‘safety’ and ‘security’, while a digital prison is being built around them designed to ensure no move – or thought – remains private.

WA Police already have more than enough capabilities to effectively protect the community – perhaps much more than is actually needed to serve this purpose.

In 2019, City of Perth introduced 700 facial recognition CCTV cameras that reports stated would “…be able to recognise your face, tell your gender and track your movements”.

This shift was all part of Perth’s commitment to their greater Smart Cities and Suburbs Program, a transformation seen all across Australia in major cities and regions.

The city has been working on the development and installation of hardware for four key projects of the plan — Smart Precinct, Smart Irrigation, Smart Sustainability and Data Hub.

This includes a variety of ‘smart upgrades’, such as facial recognition terminals at Perth airport, the rollout of Perth’s Optus Stadium as a ‘5G smart arena’, and much more.

Perth’s Optus Stadium becomes Australia’s first 5G ‘smart arena’
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They also already have an eerie dob-your-neighbour-in mentality regarding activities that occur in the city, keeping an eye on ‘anti-social’ behaviour that may disrupt ‘social cohesion’.

City of Perth wants you to report ‘anti-social behaviour’ to a hotline
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So, why now, do they get even more powers for surveillance to monitor everything?

It is an all-too-familiar story involving our authorities and ‘representatives’.

Last year, the Australian government launched its ‘National Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution’ (NDLFRS) for drivers licenses, a decade after the system was first proposed.

This integration will allow facial images from both passports and driver’s licences to be used within a single system for biometric verification, both as a means of “secure service access” and “helping the federal government prevent identity fraud”.

Australia to launch national facial recognition database for driver’s licenses
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Outside of governments and police intelligence operations, retail settings have increasingly adopted the invasive biometric nightmare, including pubs, stadiums, and more.

Pubs and clubs argue more facial recognition will help ‘protect public’
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Report finds major stadiums in Australia are using facial recognition
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This will likely continue and expand even further, after a prior ruling involving privacy laws and illegal surveillance at Bunnings was overturned earlier this year.

Face scans set to become commonplace in Australia after Bunnings ruling
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It is clear that the government doesn’t care about protecting your personal privacy rights, and no piece of legislation can help shelter you from this ongoing biometric shift.

All hope isn’t lost, however. We can still find alternative ways to navigate the storm on our own, including specific mask patterns that work against deep learning-based FR models.

For instance, there is one “gradient-based optimisation” process that creates a universal perturbation that falsely classifies each wearer – no matter whether male or female – as an ‘unknown identity’ when added to a mask on your face.

Researchers defeat facial recognition systems with adversarial mask pattern
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Moving forward into the future, it will ultimately be up to each and every one of us to take back control of our freedoms – once again regaining control of our personal privacy.

Science fiction control is no longer a fantasy, but an everyday reality.