Chris Ellison (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Certainly I have the report by the authors, Dr Wayman and Dr Mansfield, here. I will table the report. The report mentions the recent recommendation by the International Civil Aviation Organisation that facial recognition is the preferred biometric measure for border-crossing documents. That is quite an interesting recommendation by that body, because it controls aviation internationally.

I am not aware of the article in the Washington Post. The only thing I can say is that he may well have been referring to a system of comparing faces on a database rather than face to face, which is the SmartGate situation, where you place your passport down on the reader and the camera then reads your face as you stand in front of it. If I am wrong I will certainly clarify that but, as I understand it, comparing faces on a database is much like ‘face in the crowd’ technology, where you look at a database of faces. It does not present in the same way as with SmartGate. A consequence of that could be different results.