Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Customs Service information that I got also refers to the expert evaluation done by Dr James Wayman and Dr Anthony Mansfield. Is it possible for that to be tabled? The reason in particular I am asking about tabling that piece of advice is that there are comments by Dr James Wayman, the Director of Biometric Identification Research at San Jose State University in California, in the Washington Post about this issue. In that he indicated that facial recognition technology was not reliable enough to be used on a wide scale. His comments as reported in the Washington Post were:

“Facial recognition isn’t going to do it for us at large scale,” Wayman said. “If there’s a 10 percent error rate with 300 people on a 747, that’s a problem.”

I note the comments in relation to his report in this Customs document that we have and the discrepancy in the comments he has made there and the comments he has made in the Washington Post. Does the government have an explanation for that discrepancy? Were they different trials he was talking about? Was it a different type of evaluation? I understood those comments were about SmartGate. I could be wrong. I wondered whether there was any possible explanation for that discrepancy. In order to assist with that process, is it possible to table the expert evaluation that was done by Dr Wayman and Dr Tony Mansfield?