Lose the smile, you're in Indiana!

WRTV 6 is running a story that details my home state of Indiana's decision to disallow smiling for driver's licenses. Yes, you read that correctly. Hoosiers can no longer smile when their driver's license photos are snapped.

More troubling than the grinch-ification of the Indiana BMV, however, is their reasoning. Indiana's new facial recognition software recognizes specific facial features so that, ostensibly, identity theft becomes more difficult. More disconcerting to me, however, is how much the whole thing smacks of Big Brother. (The literary figure, kids, not the reality show.) Do we really want to record and codify the facial features of every person applying for a driver's license in Indiana? Makes for a handy database if government ever decides to become, say, intrusive or heavy handed. Not that government would ever do that - at least not any time soon, right?

I don't know. Maybe the folks at the BMV are right. Then again, the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles was ushered into the "modern era" by Joel Silverman, the former Jock-strap salesman that Governor Mitch Daniels hired away from Galyan's, a failed chain of Indianapolis Sporting Good's stores. Silverman's brief bureaucratic career was, in many people's minds, accurately characterized by my then twelve-year-old daughter shortly after she heard him speak at a town hall meeting back in Butler, Indiana. When I asked her what her impression was of Silverman she gave a one-word answer: "Loser!"

The BMV systematically dismantled their delivery service over the course of the several years by closing local branches all over the state of Indiana despite the clear wishes of Indiana taxpayers. That the same BMV is banning smiling doesn't surprise the Hoosiers I've spoken with. Given the way the BMV has been administered over the years, they stopped smiling long ago.