The Picture Of Conformity

In training the BDOs, "we teach that everybody's been in an airport long enough to know what the norm is," says Carl Maccario, a program analyst for what the TSA calls SPOT, or Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques. "There's an expected norm or an expected baseline environment. . . . We teach the BDOs, in a simplified form, to look for anomalous behavior in that environment."

Being different? A big problem.

Becoming Invisible

If we know we're being watched and know there is an expected mode of behavior, how does that change our actions?

Call it "anticipatory conformity." Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard social psychologist who has studied information technology for decades, coined the phrase in 1988.

Applying that concept to the post-9/11 era, Zuboff says she sees anticipatory conformity all around and expects it to grow even more intense.

"I think the first level of that is we anticipate surveillance and we conform, and we do that with awareness," she says. "We know, for example, when we're going through the security line at the airport not to make jokes about terrorists or we'll get nailed, and nobody wants to get nailed for cracking a joke. It's within our awareness to self-censor. And that self-censorship represents a diminution of our freedom."

We self-censor, she says, not only to follow the rules, but also to avoid the shame of being publicly singled out.

Once anticipatory conformity becomes second nature, it becomes progressively easier for people to adapt to new impositions on their privacy, their freedoms. The habit has been set. People have "internalized the surveillance architecture" within their own subconscious.

We have yet to reach the level of surveillance of, say, the ubiquitous retina-scanning in the movie "Minority Report." But the technology is changing quickly.

"The next thing is they'll just have cameras everywhere," Zuboff says. "They'll have software programmed with algorithms, and the algorithms will be able to detect these so-called anomalies. And so you may be distraught because you're flying home to your grandmother's funeral, but the algorithm has detected an anomalous behavior, and the next thing you're being strip-searched by a couple of FBI agents."

And the technology advances so insidiously, so imperceptibly, that only later will we notice how deep the changes in our lives have been.

"It's a little bit like locked doors," says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and Stanford University instructor. "Today nobody has any concept of what it's like to have a house without a locked door or a security system.