29 May 2009

Look stupid, please, so we'll recognize you

The New York Times has an editorial about new stupid regulations:
A dour turning in this era of ultrasecurity has motor vehicle officials in four states banning open-faced smiles on photo identification licenses. Other states installing high-tech facial recognition programs may follow the lead of Arkansas, Indiana, Nevada, and Virginia in insisting that the citizenry pose with “neutral facial expressions".
Grin, however, and there’ll be retakes until an outlook closer to Grant Wood’s American Gothic is achieved.
The high-tech software is designed to compare a new license photo with existing ones and signal officials when false or stolen identities may be in the works. The technology gets thrown off the track by smiles. So good citizens must stash their exuberance and wax bland in the interests of personal and national security.
Like everything else from plumbing rules to highway speeds, state definitions of a smile are bound to vary. The merest hint of something short of bemusement may make it in Arkansas, one bureaucrat allowed, but no teeth showing and don’t even think of grinning large. Virginia opts to be decidedly unamused. Its camera setting “will send an error message if it detects a non-neutral expression,” an official sternly told a reporter for The Washington Post.
In the modern state of heightened wariness, staring like a dullard sounds no more demeaning than walking in your socks through airport security. Most smiles offered up after toiling through the average DMV labyrinth are forced, anyway.
So frown. And have a nice day.
Rico says he wonders what moron is so gleeful (unless he's sixteen and it's his first license) that he smiles for the DMV camera?

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