Scott Morrison defends plan to collect travellers’ biometric data
Immigration minister says retaining sensitive personal information is ‘common standard’ in answer to privacy concerns
The immigration minister, Scott Morrison, has defended a proposal to collect Australians’ biometric data and said retaining sensitive personal information on travellers was becoming a “common standard” for countries.
The second tranche of national security legislation proposes sweeping new powers for police and intelligence agencies to detain people without charge and harsher penalties to people who assist or are involved in foreign incursions.
But the bill also grants broader powers for customs and immigration officers to harvest information using “authorised systems” to collect personal data, and potentially share it with foreign and domestic government agencies.
If passed, travellers in Australian airports could be forced to undergo searches such as iris, thermal or biometric scanning without key privacy safeguards. The shadow attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, has also raised concerns about the proposal.
Morrison told the ABC on Thursday the laws were a proportionate response to combat risks posed to Australia and ensure greater monitoring of movements in and out of the country.
“What we’re talking about here is biometric information which is becoming a common standard in what governments do to protect their citizens and to work together to protect more broadly against counter-terrorism and transnational crime and these tools are becoming the basic tools that are really necessary in a modern age to combat the real threats in a proportionate way,” he said.
The new laws have raised particular concerns because the types of personal information that can be harvested is at the discretion of the minister through regulations. The laws would also be without some existing privacy safeguards in the Migration Act, raising concerns about the security of the data.
Guardian Australia reported in February that the immigration department was involved in a major data breach where the personal details of 10,000 asylum seekers were accidentally placed on the immigration department’s website.
Morrison said any biometric data would be securely held and that “these are the internal systems that sit behind the various walls that are necessary to contain the security of this type of information”.
When questioned about the asylum seeker data breach he added: “The one you referred to in terms of immigration was in a completely different context and a different type of information and how that is stored to the one that we’re referring to in this conversation. And on that case the weaknesses that were identified have been rectified.”
The privacy commissioner is still conducting an investigation into the circumstances of the asylum seeker data breach, and the full bench of the federal court is expected to hear a landmark case relating to the breach later in October.
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/oct/16/scott-morrison-defends-biometric-data
