Tomorrow John Gilmore gets a hearing on Gilmore v. Gonzales. On the fourth of July 2002 John attempted to board an airplane, was told he must show identification, refused to do so, and was denied entry to the aircraft. He has not flown since. Instead, he sued.
The hearing will be
December 8th 2005 at 9am
9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
Third Floor, Courtroom 3
95 Seventh Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
If you are familiar with the case and will be in San Francisco, it would be worth attending, especially if you’re interested in helping elminate what Cory Doctorow calls "a back-door to mandating Soviet-style internal passports for travel."
If you are not familiar with the case, here is a very brief overview; see the above URL for more details. There is no published law that says travelers have to show identification to board airplanes (or trains, buses, cruise ships, etc.) not even the so-called PATRIOT Act requires this. Airlines claim there is such a law. The United States is not supposed to have secret laws. Especially one like this that violates the First Amendment (right to assemble) and the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Showing ID on airlines was a hasty patch after TWA Flight 800 crashed in New York, so Bill Clinton would have something to say to the families. After 9/11, it became entrenched. Because it’s been around a few years doesn’t make it legal. Nor does that make it effective; any college student can tell you how to get a fake ID to get beer, and targetting searches actually makes it easier for perpetrators to beat the system, as a team of MIT mathematicians has proven, and experience already indicated.
Apparently nobody before Gilmore was willing to actually test this secret law.
What does this have to do with the Internet? Well, Gilmore was one of the earliest employees as Sun Microsystems, which produced some of the earliest Internet workstations, and he is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); I’ve known him for many years. Plus if people are prevented from attending conferences to discuss Internet technical, business, or political matters because they won’t or can’t show ID, that affects the Internet and all of us.
A show of security is not the same as security. Ben Franklin said that anyone who would give up liberty to gain a little security deserved neither. In this case, we’ve given up liberty and lost security, too.
-jsq
Airlines don’t need to prove that there is such a law. I think it will be found that the airline, a non-government company, has the right to refuse service to anyone. It’s really that simple.
Edward Hasbrouck addresses that point:
‘But as I’ve noted earlier in relation to this appeal, airlines can be licensed under U.S. Federal law only on condition that they agree to operate as “common carriers”. Unlike some other businesses, they can’t say, “We reserve the right to refuse service”, or tell a would-be passenger to take their business elsewhere. It would be a Federal offense for an airline to refuse to transport (as both Southwest and United did in Mr. Gilmore’s case) anyone who is willing to pay the fare in their published tariff and complies with their published conditions of carriage, as that tariff and those conditions are filed with the government.’
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000957.html