Microsoft has announced it will provide the Australian New South Wales (NSW) Police force with its facial recognition technology to speed up the state’s surveillance footage analysis. The state police’s older systems involved CCTV footage—and other forms of evidence required in investigations—stored on servers locally, which required time-consuming manual review from police. The new system involves sending footage to the “cloud”—in this case, Microsoft’s own servers—to identify suspects using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). According to Microsoft, one particular case saw NSW Police collect 14,000 pieces of CCTV for a murder and assault investigation, analysing what would normally require weeks or months in just five hours. “Detectives were able to then within days piece together the time sequence of events, movements and interactions of the person of interest as well as overlay this onto a geospatial platform, visualising the data for detectives and aiding in the preparation of …