On Compliance and Noncompliance

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Did you travel anywhere by air last summer?

Odds are good, if you departed from any of the country's major airports, you were asked to submit to a facial recognition scan as part of the check-in process. The TSA began introducing facial recognition in 2020, but dramatically expanded the program this past spring and hopes to bring the technology to more than 430 airports nationwide.

The TSA also hopes to make the scans mandatory, but currently, they are optional.

Privacy experts have raised big concerns about the scans, and strongly recommend that people opt out. Senator Jeff Markley has cosponsored a bipartisan bill to preserve the right to refuse the scans, declaring, “No one should be required to have their face scanned to travel, and no government should have the power of a national surveillance system at its fingertips.”

At each of the checkpoints I went through this summer, there was signage stating that travelers had the right to decline participation.

Yet each time I went through one of these checkpoints, I watched nearly every single person in front of me submit to the scans.

I opted out, and the TSA made nothing of my choice. Yet almost no one else did.

Did you experience this, too?

Here we are in a period of alarming authoritarian consolidation, and if you were to judge from people's behavior in the TSA line, nearly everyone is meekly going along to get along.

I've thought about this everyday compliance often since I traveled this summer – in a time of many big horrors, I've somehow found this display of quiet cooperation extra chilling.

But I'm not ready to think it means we're dealing with an intrinsically passive populace, as Trump continues to try to expand his power.

This summer was, after all, also the season when non-compliance and noncooperation became top-of-mind watchwords for significant sectors of the current resistance to Trump.

Networks and organizations including the Freedom Trainers and the Horizons Project have been offering information and trainings on strategic noncooperation on an ever-growing scale since Trump retook office in January.

You may have heard about, or attended, one of the excellent One Million Rising noncooperation trainings this summer, organized and promoted via the broad No Kings coalition.

Through these and related efforts, thousands of people have been brainstorming and discussing ways to withhold cooperation from the current regime. I haven't yet seen reportbacks on the ideas generated through these meetings and conversations, but the very fact that they're happening is already an encouraging sign. It’s a major expansion of the progressive movement’s overall civil resistance strategy, building on months of work to break through a culture of fear and mobilize huge numbers of people into the streets.

I’ve been most struck, however, by a powerful recent example of noncompliance that wasn’t guided by any kind of organized group. Ordinary citizens of Washington, D.C. recently offered a master class in how not to go along with authoritarian overreach. On at least eight separate occasions, D.C. grand juries have refused to bring felony indictments sought by federal prosecutors against people arrested during Trump's militarized crackdown on the city – including the man who went viral for angrily throwing a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Patrol agent.

These refusals represented such a humiliation for the Trump administration that there's reason to believe they played some role in the recent decision to back off from sending National Guard troops to Chicago. (The highly organized character of Chicago anti-ICE efforts, and the very public pushback from Gov. JB Pritzker, were even more crucial.)

There's no reason, of course, to think that anyone on these grand juries ever attended a noncooperation training.

It's possible, though, that some grand jurors were aware of the general atmosphere of resistance to Trump’s D.C. incursion, whether through extensive local organizing efforts or the massive Hands Off and No Kings rallies that have taken place this year – mobilizations have unpredictable spillover effects.

We've seen so much capitulation and compliance from so many quarters since Trump's second term began. I find myself reflecting on the grand-jury non-compliance as evidence that resistance doesn't always look like marching in the street or holding rallies or attending meetings. Noncompliance doesn't always look like civil disobedience, or other acts of organized protest.

Sometimes noncooperation looks like regular people stubbornly holding to the existing rules and procedures of a democratic society. May this brand of quiet defiance continue to spread.

And may all of us practice exercising the muscle of noncooperation wherever we can — including the airport check-in line.

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