TSA is Watching Your Face

Jan 2nd, 2008 by John Stodder

They say your face is your fortune. But recent reports suggest your face could be your misfortune, too — if you are prone to facial expressions that your typical terrorist makes.

The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) has dispatched a squad of specially-trained microfacial expression analysts to U.S. airports to monitor passengers’ brief, subtle changes of expression in response to agency questions. Smile or frown at the wrong time, and you’re on the hook for secondary screening.

The program is not new. It started in Boston, MA and Providence, RI in 2003 as a pilot program, then grew to 50 airports with more airports to come. The story is in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (but I saw it first on Boing-Boing.)

TSA officials will not reveal specific behaviors identified by the program — called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) — that are considered indicators of possible terrorist intent.

But a central task is to recognize microfacial expressions — a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt, said Carl Maccario, who helped start the program for TSA.

“In the SPOT program, we have a conversation with (passengers) and we ask them about their trip,” said Maccario from his office in Boston. “When someone lies or tries to be deceptive, … there are behavior cues that show it. … A brief flash of fear.”

At Sea-Tac airport, the program has been in place for 13 months. Six hundred travelers have been referred to secondary screening, and 11 people have been arrested. (Mostly for illegal drugs, I’m guessing.)

The agency stresses that microfacial analysis beats racial profiling. To prove TSA’s sensitivity, officials described a meeting to reassure people with Tourette’s disorder that their out-of-control tics wouldn’t trigger alarms. (This sounds like a meeting someone in the TSA’s PR agency concocted.)

Already, a few bloggers have drawn parallels with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, specifically this passage:

“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.”

It’s hard not to go there, considering all the different thoughts and fantasies going through your mind while you stand in a security line and how they might affect your facial expression. James Joyce’s Ulysses might be the more appropriate literary reference. Or how about the Beatles?

Take it easy take it easy.
Everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey.
Your inside is out and your outside is in.
Your outside is in and your inside is out.
So come on

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow gets to the real question. What can TSA credibly claim it is finding on our faces?

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….

The word I have yet to see in any of the coverage or blogging: Poker. Whether there is science to this routine or not, there are people who make a profitable living reading other’s facial expressions and body language while hiding their own, such as champion poker players. In fact we all read faces; it’s a matter of personal survival to find clues about what’s going on in our social networks and faces are a language we all know. At home, we challenge our spouses and kids: “Why’d you give me that look?” Because, even though they say they’re saying what we want to hear, their rolling eyes and pursed lips often tell another story. Where facial expressions can’t be visible, we take pains to find tools to replace them so we ourselves are not misunderstood. Like this one, for example, “ ,” which means, What I just wrote was said in jest, so don’t be insulted. We don’t just read faces, we deliver faces, desperate to be understood.