Mr. Drew Harris:

I thank the committee for inviting me and my colleague the Garda chief information officer, Andrew O’Sullivan, to present today.

Every major criminal investigation now involves processing digital evidence. This evidence can take the form of images or footage obtained through warrant from seized devices or CCTV. Two separate judgments from the Court of Appeal recently confirm that the Garda has a duty to process available footage to identify or exclude suspects.

Digitalisation in society has led to an explosion in the volume of digital footage as evidence. For instance, the footage from the 23 November riots runs to 22,000 hours or a total of 916 days of footage. Individual murder investigations have had upwards of 50,000 hours of footage. Seized devices can have over 1 million images of child sexual abuse material.

The key to these cases may just be in a few frames out of millions. A child’s school uniform crest can help to identify the victim. The importance of brief footage in a murder investigation or an arson investigation cannot be overemphasised in making a detection for serious crime.

Digital evidence that the Garda has a duty to process is now at big data scale in terms of its massive volume, complexity of formats and the rate at which it is generated. Digital crime and evidence can only be investigated with digital tools. Manual processing by Garda personnel sitting at screens is unfeasible and ineffective. In the case of child sexual abuse material, which is the rape of children and every form of sexual depravity that can be visited on a defenceless victim, there is the traumatic impact on Garda members who view the material.

To be effective at fulfilling our mandate to protect victims, investigate crime and vindicate the human rights of citizens in a digital society, An Garda Síochána must have access to modern digital image analysis and recognition tools.

There is understandable public concern, and perhaps some confusion, about AI technology and how An Garda Síochána intends to use it as an investigative tool. I wish to clarify that digitalisation in An Garda Síochána means that electronic tools act only in support of decisions taken by gardaí. There is never a question of autonomous machine decision-making. All decisions that can impact on a person are only taken by identifiable and accountable personnel. This decision support approach is already used. People make the final decision in many areas within An Garda Síochána, including for driver penalty notices that are initiated by Go Safe vans, the 600,000 vetting applications that we process annually, the use of technology to flag uninsured vehicles and the existing use of biometric processing in online abuse cases. Most of these cases involve searching or sifting massive amounts of evidence for the material relevant to the decision-maker’s decision.

An Garda Síochána has invested significantly in digital policing, including the in-house expert professionals required to build and manage the underlying technology and data. This has directly contributed to our effectiveness in major investigations. The reliability of biometric decision support tools is demonstrated by the success of the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau in detecting and prosecuting online abuse cases, often as part of transnational investigations. The accuracy of more modern biometric identification systems is clearly demonstrated by the biannual review by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST. We intend to follow the practice of European law enforcement partners in using these ratings to select the best available technology. There must be safeguards but these should be proportionate to the risks involved in the specific use cases.

In summary, extending the already accurate, reliable and safe usage of image analysis and biometric identification technology beyond abuse cases to other serious criminal investigations is essential for An Garda Síochána in our mission to keep people safe in a rapidly changing digital society, to counter emerging threats and to meet our obligations to work with European law enforcement partners to counter transnational organised crime.