Mr. Andrew O'Sullivan:

The Deputy asked about the other jurisdictions that have banned the use of FRT It is important to make the distinction between real-time facial recognition, where a decision is being made autonomously by a machine, such as a camera, and retrospective analysis, where a decision is being made by a human on the basis of the recommendation or suggestion of the software. We have absolutely no intention of doing real-time facial recognition. We also have no time at all for autonomous machine decision-making. Every decision will be made by a person and he or she will be responsible for that.

The Metropolitan Police, the Met, study is five years old at this stage so it relates to older technology. It also relates to the use of real-time autonomous machine decision-making as opposed to that retrospective basis. In terms of the approach that is followed and the banning by other jurisdictions or other police forces, it is absolutely not the case that the US has banned the use of facial recognition in retrospective cases such as those relating to child sexual abuse materials. All of our child sexual abuse material investigations are transnational and many of them are with the US, where this material is either sourced or published. I can say definitively that the same technology we have outlined in our use cases in our submission is absolutely in use in every developed country and in no cases has it been banned. It is absolutely impossible to process child sexual abuse material cases without the use of this type of technology.

I will make the case again that what we are primarily talking about in use cases Nos. 1 to 8 in our submission is the use of the technology to filter, cluster or sift evidence and to boil it down to a series of suggested cases at which the examiner would look. It does not make definitive identifications. We do not have a reference database, as is sometimes misunderstood, that we can compare against. We are not attempting to make identifications. What we are doing is boiling down considerable amounts of images to a manageable set. The decision will always be made by a member of Garda personnel. That is an identifiable and accountable member of Garda personnel. There have already been hundreds of prosecutions and court cases where this information has been available for the courts to challenge. There has never been much of a challenge and there has certainly never been a successful challenge to that process. The digitalisation process is a combination of the electronic tools and boiling the cases down to something manageable for a person to make a decision. That is exactly what we are talking about. There is absolutely no question of autonomous machine decision-making, which has been rightly banned in other jurisdictions. We have never asked for that.