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.
– George Orwell, 1984
This article reveals that the Orwellian age is truly upon us:
New airport agents check for danger in fliers’ facial expressions
“WASHINGTON – Next time you go to the airport, there may be more eyes on you than you notice.
Specially trained security personnel are watching body language and facial cues of passengers for signs of bad intentions. The watcher could be the attendant who hands you the tray for your laptop or the one standing behind the ticket-checker. Or the one next to the curbside baggage attendant.”
More and more we are being conditioned to live in an Orwellian (and in other ways, Huxleyan) world, a “panopticon” prison system in which even the microemotions of our faces may be considered terroristic.