Cheese?

I overheard something at a checkout counter a while ago that still has my head spinning round and round.
The cashier noted that the customer in front of me had a nice driver's license picture. Yeah, but not for long, the customer said. "I hear they don't let you smile any more."
No smiling? In a decade in which positive attitude and optimism have become something of a national obsession, we're not allowed to smile on a driver's license picture?
True. Turns out at least four states have adopted "no smile" rules for driver's license pictures. (Story here.) Missouri and Kansas are not among the four. Not yet, at least.
It's all about the new facial recognition software some states are using to prevent people from getting fake drivers' licenses. The software matches new pictures with previous ones to ferret out attempts to fake a license and an identity. But the program has trouble if the photos are of more extreme expressions, such as a big grin.
Hence, no smiling.
(That probably wouldn't have been a problem for the people who waited hours at the Mission, KS motor vehicles department yesterday because the one in Olathe was closed.)
For years, people have been promoting the idea that one way to improve your outlook on life is to smile more often. There's been all kinds of research on it, which I won't go into here.
But I've been no big fan of this, mainly because I've tried it and it is near impossible to do without some kind of shock collar as a reminder.
The smiley idea persists, though, and--predictably--some people have gone overboard. There's Walmart, which puts the smiley face everywhere (look here for a story about a former employee who claimed she was fired for not smiling enough). And in Japan, a machine apparently measures the depth of customer service smiles and critiques them.
So the machines have it both ways. Smile harder to please them in Japan, don't smile at all in the US. It's just one more step toward our enslavement to robot overlords.
But wait. There are other uses for facial recognition software besides warding off fake licenses. Law enforcement also uses cameras in public places to look for terrorists, fugitives, etc.
So here's a question: Can the terrorists, knowing this, avoid detection by sporting big silly grins whenever they go out to a shopping mall or football game? And if that's the case, will we eventually learn that the guy with the grin is more likely to do us in than his scowling companion? Will grinning become a bad thing, associated with criminals?
Or will his sunny smile turn him into a sunny optimist incapable of any thoughts that don't involve rainbows and unicorns?