The
Australian Minister for Human Services, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister
for Digital Transformation and Liberal MP for Stirling, 46 year-old Michael Fayat Keenan, is
all gung-ho for digital transformation.
The problem
is that he is just not good at being transformative – rather like his prime
minister.
One could almost see the trainwreck coming down the line from the moment of then Communications Minister Turnbull's initial joint announcement with then Prime Minister Tony Abbott in 2015.
Despite the obvious problems Michael Keenan will be commencing pre-rollout trials of a facial recognition program this year,
Yahoo
News, 1 July
20118:
Welfare recipients will
soon be asked to have their faces scanned before they can claim their benefits.
It is part of a new
trial of biometric security measures the government will begin within months.
Similar to how
SmartGates work at airports to check passports, government services will ask
recipients to take a photo on a computer or phone to create a MyGov ID.
The photo will then be
checked against passports and driver’s licences.
But there are questions
as to whether this information could be misused.
Australian Privacy
Foundation’s Bernard Robertson-Dunn said people needed to be assured “it works
properly” and the government “doesn’t use the technology to do things it didn’t
say it was going to do”.
Human Services Minister
Michael Keenan said on May 1 the misuse of data which could be used to “impinge
on people’s privacy” was “clearly” a concern for many Australians.
The 2016 Census is an
example of a recent government technology fail….
Uses for the MyGov ID
will trial from October – with an all-online way to get a tax file number.
Next year Centrelink
services, including Newstart and Youth Allowance, will also be trialled.
Here is the organisational and technological mess that Keenan helped create…..
The Canberra Times, 29 June 2018, p.14:
The agency charged with
guiding IT projects has been sidelined from major policies and is removed from
the Coalition's thinking about digital reform, an inquiry into the
government's $10 billion tech spend has found.
A report released on
Wednesday has called for a central vision to guide the government in its IT
reform and found changes to the Digital Transformation Agency
had left it watching on as major tech projects hit disaster.
The inquiry found the
DTA did not have the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission's botched
project to adopt biometric technology on its watchlist and that it had failed
to involve itself in determining why the Education Department's Australian Apprenticeship
Management System project was called off.
It was sidelined as the
Department of Home Affairs took charge of cyber policy, the Prime Minister's
department assumed control of data policy and the newly created Office of the
Information Commissioner was created separate from the DTA, the report said.
"The evidence heard
by this committee revealed an organisation that was not at the centre of government
thinking about digital transformation, or responsible for the
creation and enactment of a broader vision of what that transformation would
look like," it said.
News.com.au, 12 June 2018:
Australians will be able
to access government services with a single log-in under a plan to create a
"single digital identity" by 2025.
Michael Keenan, the
federal minister in charge of digital services, said face-to-face interactions
with government services would be greatly reduced.
"Think of it as a
100-point digital ID check that will unlock access to almost any government
agency through a single portal such as a myGov account," Mr Keenan said.
The minister wants
Australia to be a world leader in digital government, with almost all services
to be available online by 2025.
Mr Keenan said having 30
different log-ins for government services is not good enough.
"The old ways of
doing things, like forcing our customers to do business with us over the
counter, must be re-imagined and refined," he said.
People will need to
establish their digital identity once before being able to use it across
services.
The first of several
pilot programs using a "beta" version of what will be known as
myGovID will begin in October.
The initial pilot will
enable 100,000 participants to apply for a tax file number online, which Mr
Keenan says will reduce processing time to a day from up to a month currently.
In a pilot starting from
March next year, services including student identification and Centrelink will
be connected to the digital identity.
Also from March 2019,
100,000 people will be able to use their digital identity to create their My
Health Record online.
Mr Keenan says one
face-to-face or over-the-counter transaction costs on average about $17 to
process, while an online transaction can cost less than 40 cents.
The Human Services
department will operate as the gateway between service providers and people.
"This is key to
protecting privacy, as the exchange will act as a double-blind - service
providers will not see any of the user's ID information and identity providers
will not know what services each user is accessing," Mr Keenan said.
Labor digital economy
spokesman Ed Husic said the Turnbull government was responsible for a
"dirty dozen" of failed digital transformation failures, including
the census and tax office website crashes.
"The biggest challenge
confronting the Turnbull government is to quit its addiction to glitzy digital
announcements and get stuck into properly delivering these multimillion-dollar
projects," Mr Husic said.
The Australian Crime
Intelligence Commission has suspended the contract for its beleaguered biometric
identification services project in order to renegotiate it after the contractor
failed to meet the deadline for completion and the cost ran $40 million over
budget.
It follows a
recommendation from a scathing independent review late last year that the
contract be overhauled, the project be simplified and the timeline for delivery
changed.
In 2016 ACIC (then
CrimTrac) contracted NEC Australia to deliver a program that would replace the
national automated fingerprint identification system, adding in facial
recognition, palm prints and foot prints and would be available for use by
police forces around the country.
Industry news website
InnovationAus reported on Wednesday that NEC contractors had been marched from
ACIC's premises on Monday June 4, after being told that the project had been
suspended at the start of June.
It is believed the
project has been suspended until Friday, while the negotiations over the contract
take place.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers
report last November seen by Fairfax Media said "a chain of decisions
involving all levels and stakeholders" had led to the project running
behind schedule and over budget.
It recommended that the
scope of the project be simplified and standardised, and called it "highly
challenged" and presenting a "high risk" to the commission.
"There is low
confidence in likelihood of delivery which requires focus to achieve
turnaround."
Poor communication,
operational silos, limited collaboration and a failure to estimate the
project's complexity had blown it off-track, the report said.
The report also
recommended that the existing fingerprint database contract with Morpho be
extended for 12 months after its expiry last month. It is not clear whether
this contract was extended as recommended……
NEC Australia was also
the contractor for the failed Australian apprentice management system, which
was dumped by the Department of Education and Training last month due to
critical defects, also found by a report by PwC.
InnovationAus, 12 June 2018:
NEC Australia won a $52
million tender for the Biometric Identification Services project in early 2016.
The project involved replacing the ACIC’s National Automated Fingerprint
Identification System with a “multi-modal biometric identification” service,
incorporating fingerprints, footprints and facial recognition.
But the project is
running behind schedule and is understood to be returning a high amount of
false positives.
ABC
News, 28 May 2018:
A massive case of
mistaken identity in the UK is prompting calls for a rethink on plans to use
facial recognition technology to track down terrorists and traffic offenders.
"If you have
technology that is not up to scratch and it is bringing back high returns of
false positives then you really need to go back to the drawing board,"
president-elect of the Law Council of Australia Arthur Moses told AM.
The comments follow
revelations a London police trial of facial recognition technology generated
104 "alerts", of which 102 were false.
The technology scanned
CCTV footage from the Notting Hill Carnival and Six Nations Rugby matches in
London in search of wanted criminals.
