TSA CRIBS DIRECTLY FROM OWELL'S '1984'

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CORY DOCTOROW, BOING BOING - TSA screeners are learning to recognize a
set of secret, forbidden facial expressions. If your face slips into one
of these during a TSA inspection, you will be taken off and given a
thorough, secondary screening. . . Making Light's Avram Grumer draws a
vivid parallel to Orwell's facecrime:

"He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for
as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not
been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your
thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a
telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an
unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself - anything
that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something
to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to
look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a
punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime,
it was called. (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part 1, Chapter 5)"

It's a complicated issue: on the one hand, this beats racial profiling.
On the other hand, the penalty for wearing the wrong face is
nigh-unlimited. We've all heard stories of screeners detaining people,
forbidding them to fly, and so on, in a kind of bottomless expression of
authority without oversight. I'd feel a lot better about this if the TSA
would publish the forbidden faces (look, if it's peer-reviewed science,
that means terrorists can just look it up in the damned journals, and if
it's not science, why should we believe it works?) so that we can all
verify for ourselves whether this actually works or whether it's just a
bunch of hooey; I'd also feel better if the TSA acted as though the
Constitution mattered to them, securing us from unreasonable search and
seizure, being answerable to us as their tax-paying employers, and
maintaining the presumption of innocence throughout our traveling
experience.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/01/tsa-to-punish-fliers.html

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