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A blow for freedom According to a 9th Circuit case decided in favour of John Gilmore, you do not have to provide identification to travel. You may instead submit to secondary screening.
Read more about it here.
Erratum: Actually, Gilmore *lost* the case, but the judges stated what I said above.
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The ninth circuit decided AGAINST John. Sorry to say, but you have the sense of the whole thing backwards.
Yes, you are correct. I wondered why the world looked strange today… I’ll have to get my head turned around.
Although I stated this incorrectly, it is indeed the case the court stated you are not required to carry id:
“The one ray of light from the court was its confirmation that the secret law “requires that airline passengers either present identification or be subjected to a more extensive search”. This would be a surprise to anyone who reads a TSA checkpoint sign or TSA’s own website, all of which claim that ID is “required”. It is now clear that air passengers are NOT required to present identification; instead, they can opt to be searched, as a “selectee”.”
Meanwhile, I don’t see the airlines getting too uppity about this. If the government were suddenly to have a libertarian epiphany, the airlines (which own the planes, remember) would still require ID — why shouldn’t they?
There are better battles to be waged than this one.
The main issue here is secret law. The entire idea is straight out of Kafka. I’m sorry, “KipEsquire”, but I don’t see that there are more important issues than forcing the government to tell people what the law is. That’s about the most fundamental thing I can think of. The detail that the case involves ID cards is not the core of the issue.
It’s like the sole useful purpose of vehicle speed limits is to reduce the number of deaths and severity of injury.
But you’d struggle to deduce that from the laws and their enforcement.
Best regards
I knew all this last year when I went on a bounce through five or six airports from Daisy Hollow to Seattle, San Francisco and back. I blew out of my house way too early in the morning and left all my ID on my desk. The lady at ticketing got together with the TSA twits and they worked it out exactly as described: I got specially picked-over at every gate on that trip.
Within the general context of the whole project going to hell on a rocket-sled in recent years, it was no big deal.