Isn't this something. You can't fly without a proper ID, but you can drive, work, BECOME PRESIDENT and vote without proper ID!
Starting this year, Americans will have to get government approval to
travel by air. As Privacy Journal revealed last fall, henceforth
"Permission Now Needed to Travel Within U.S." Getting a reservation and
checking-in for air travel will soon require Transportation Security
Administration authorization. That permission is by no means assured:
For example, if your name matches a "no-fly" list, even mistakenly, you
can be denied the right to a reserve a seat on a flight. If your name
is on a "selectee" list, you and your possessions will be searched more
thoroughly before you can board. What is going on here?
Protecting air safety is essential, but professional
screening at airports already provides for it. Giving the TSA as an
official agency the additional authority to decide who gets to go where
reaches beyond safety into overextended governmental power. This newly
minted "Secure Flight" rule fundamentally imbalances long-standing
citizens' rights both to travel and to be left alone. If your name
appears among hundreds of thousands on "watchlists," you assert that
the government should not require ID to fly, you don't want to reveal
your date of birth for concern about identity theft, or you don't
choose to declare your gender, you can stay home.
By combining the requirement for government photo IDs in
order to fly with checking government watchlists including potentially
every passenger, "Secure Flight" puts the federal government into the
business of licensing travel. All travelers will need government OK in
order to board a flight, or take a cruise. What the government can
allow one day, it can forbid the next. All things considered, isn't
this a higher-tech and later-day version of South African domestic
passports or eastern European checkpoints? In fact, because of the high
technological capacity of the U.S. version, aren't its implications for
travel control of plane, train, bus and subway travel much more far
reaching? It's incredible that something like this is happening
relatively unrecognized in America.
While some people consider the requirement to show ID or
reveal a birth date a small trade-off for security, what is at stake
here is the right to travel. That fundamental freedom of movement
appears in the Articles of Confederation in the right to freely enter
and leave all the states of the then small union. It was so
fundamentally a part of American citizenship that the privileges and
immunities clauses of the Constitution included it without explicitly
mentioning it again for the more perfect union. With a large and
expansive nation now ranging from Hawaii and Alaska to Washington DC,
that right to travel nationally, and petition the distant government,
is even more fundamental. Yet some courts maintain that if you can
walk, you don't need the right to fly. People have the right to walk
around freely without carrying a national ID; why do they have to show
one to travel? The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the scope of the
right to travel but lower courts have tended to restrict it more
narrowly than the Founding Fathers would approve.
Clearly, the air ID and "Secure Flight" rules mean you cannot
travel any distance reachable only by air without official permission.
Moreover, the system can easily be extended to Amtrak as a government
railroad, which already requires government ID in order to purchase a
ticket. It can further be extended to urban rapid-transit networks tied
to travel cards, and private inter-city buses requiring IDs to buy
tickets or board coaches. These are the bases for an internal passport
system in the U.S.
There are a lot of practical issues here too. The assumption
that any "no-fly" list includes all potential wrong doers is
implausible, and first time criminals would by definition not appear
until it's too late. Many people on these lists are there because their
names are similar to those who are suspect for other reasons. There are
perhaps a few hundred people whose past activities merit keeping them
off the streets, let alone flights; the small group is better caught
through search warrants and good police work before they come to the
airport. To demand that 750 million annual passengers have to get
government permissions to fly creates a needle in-a-haystack approach
to locating a few potential wrongdoers (none so far have been caught by
the matching). "Secure Flight" is simply an ineffective use of scarce
resources that sweeps much too broadly over people's most basic rights
to travel and be let alone.
What can you do? Like other regulations quickly promulgated
at the end of an outgoing administration, these rules need to be
delayed and reconstituted. Contact your Senators, Representatives and
the White House to suspend such ill-considered regulations now. Insist
that the government create a system that makes flying safe without
granting federal officials the final say over permission for citizens
to travel. Otherwise, the traveling public may be detoured onto a
perilous downhill road to being permanently grounded.