THOUSANDS of Australians have their identity stolen every day, costing the public billions of dollars every year.
To combat the problem, police need better access to information, including access to photos from every drivers' licence in the country, argues the head of CrimTrac, Ben McDevitt.
Mr McDevitt hopes to give police ready access to passport photos, the registries of births, deaths and marriages, and the electoral roll, he told the biennial conference of the NSW Police Association this week.
CrimTrac is a federal agency which keeps and develops national databases of information including criminal histories, DNA and fingerprints.
Currently, police who check a driver's licence cannot verify that the photo on the licence is the same as that stored on RTA records, he said.
Nor can authorities detect multiple licences issued in different names but with the same photo, Mr McDevitt said. But facial recognition technology could easily detect such fraud.
The head of the Queensland Fraud and Corporate Crime Group, Brian Hay, said gangs defrauding Queensland shops with false credit cards routinely used Victorian or NSW drivers' licences, aware that Queensland police could not verify their identities if they questioned them. ''They are using the jurisdictional issues against us.''
But approval from roads and transport authorities and ministers across the country is still needed before CrimTrac can set up a national database allowing police access to driver's licence photos, Mr McDevitt said.
''If police are to address the issue of identity crime thoroughly, they need to have access to the sort of data that is held by various governments in order to establish an individual's identity.''
The best way to verify information was with checks of fingerprints or other biometric information, Mr McDevitt said.
Already, such information is routinely collected from Australians who travel to the US or Britain to protect their borders and the identities of their citizens, he said. ''We have to get with the times in Australia.''
Fingerprint recognition is also used to gain access to some workplaces or homes, and for computer security. Unfortunately, it was part of the ''Australian psyche'' to believe ''fingerprint equals criminality'', Mr McDevitt said.
''I don't find that at all threatening or big brotherish.''
Most of the new technologies enhanced privacy, he said. ''We have a unique individual identity and that needs to be protected so that others can't steal it from us.''
Yet he insists it was important to get the balance right between access to information by police and privacy protection of the individual. ''I think a balance can be struck. The two aren't mutually exclusive.''
And there were occasions, he said, when it was a good thing for the protection of the community to sacrifice some privacy by making information available to law enforcement.
Mr McDevitt also told the conference about number-plate recognition technology, already widely used in Britain. This could be used to ensure trucks abide by rules for regular breaks, as well as to detect stolen or unlicensed vehicles. But an enhancement of the technology could also help police track organised crime across state borders, he said.
