The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
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David Heath
Saturday, 05 September 2009 10:33
The media release quotes a wonderful piece of marketing babble which must surely have come from the suppliers of the facial recognition system. "Facial recognition is the most effective way to identify driver licence fraud. The technology analyses almost 170 points on the human face and translates the information into a mathematical formula, or template, and searches for likely matches in the system."
This is the technical equivalent of "eleven spices and herbs."
"VicRoads will then investigate any potential matches and hand over suspected fraud cases to Victoria Police. This work will make it harder than ever for people to collect a number of licences for multiple identities."
What the release doesn't say is what initially happens when a match is found. In other, similar systems iTWire is aware of; all 'interesting' photos are passed to a human to confirm whether or not they really are closely related. This occurs long before any accusations of fraud are made as there is no ability for the system to guarantee a match.
There will be some amusing side-effects from this technology. For instance, authorities will be able to note which licences are NOT renewed and go knocking on doors to find out why, especially when the photo on an old licence looks a lot like a new one (in a different name).
Also, if the Australian passport procedures are anything to go by, there will also be mistakes. Stories of errors are quite common – for instance, there was one reported case of a Caucasian woman receiving her new passport with the photo of an Asian man in it! These are much less likely to occur in a store-front production facility and much more easily corrected than when the production is separated from the consumer.
Finally, there is no mention of "mission creep." We are not told whether the facial recognition database is a closed system or whether it will be used to (for instance) attempt matches with Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle's street surveillance cameras. Neither are we told of other features - perhaps embedded RFID tags.
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