Thanks to artificial intelligence, faking someone's voice is easier than ever - all you need is a few minutes of audio. An investigation by Guardian Australia has found that this technology is able to fool a voice identification system that's used by the Australian government to secure the private information of millions of people. Data and interactives editor Nick Evershed explains how he discovered this security flaw and AI expert Toby Walsh explores how this technology could potentially make it easier than ever to steal someone's identity or commit scams

Interest in the possibilities afforded by algorithms and big data continues to blossom as early adopters gain benefits from AI systems that automate decisions as varied as making customer recommendations, screening job applicants, detecting fraud, and optimizing logistical routes.1 But when AI applications fail, they can do so quite spectacularly.2 Consider the recent example of Australia's "robodebt" scandal.3 In 2015, the Australian government established its Income Compliance Program, with the goal of clawing back unemployment and disability benefits that had been made inappropriately to recipients. It set out to identify overpayments by analyzing discrepancies between the annual income that individuals reported and the income assessed by the Australian Tax Office.

Automation in public administration is inevitable and can bring great benefits. The broadly accepted law of robotics is that a robot may not injure a human being. In an attempt to reduce welfare costs in 2016, the commonwealth government engaged in an unlawful debt recovery process. The bureaucratic process was malign and was meant either directly or collaterally to harm and stigmatise welfare recipients. The Online Compliance Intervention – or OCI, but more commonly known as robodebt – used algorithms to average out incomes of welfare recipients by matching ATO income data with social welfare recipients' income as self-reported to Centrelink with Centrelink.

The Commonwealth Ombudsman has agreed to open a new investigation into Centrelink's Online Compliance Intervention (OCI), better known as'robo-debt'. The OCI is a government initiative to recover supposed welfare overpayments. As part of the OCI, hundreds of thousands of letters have been sent to current and former welfare recipients asking them to explain discrepancies between Australian Taxation Office (ATO) income data and income reported to Centrelink. If they were unable to explain the difference, then a debt would be raised against them. The program was widely criticised for putting the onus on individuals to explain discrepancies in government data.

Australian law explicitly allows computers to make important decisions previously made by the ministers or staff of at least 11 federal government departments. This has been going on since at least 2001, well before the age of algorithms, and yet there remains little clarity about exactly what decisions are being entrusted to the computers. As best we can tell, the first legislation allowing computers to automatically make important decisions with real impact on people's lives was the Social Security (Administration) Act -- which also happens to be the critical piece of legislation that allowed the most high-profile and controversial automated government program so far, Centrelink's'robodebt' endeavour. The legislation giving computers decision-making power over social security is very short and, as these things go, easy to understand. It was introduced in 2001 along with a slew of other provisions around debt recovery.