Back in 1984, we congratulated ourselves on the difference between our lives of liberty and democracy and the dystopian universe George Orwell imagined in his landmark novel, a place where government-operated televisions spied on their viewers and hidden cameras monitored private lives. But while we smugly engaged in what amounted to nearly two decades of back-slapping, engineers were developing biometric technologies that could remake our society into Orwell's Oceania, all in the name of progress. The most disturbing of these technologies are facial recognition systems, computer-powered cameras that can identify an individual based on facial characteristics captured by the camera's lens.