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Your Right to Travel Anonymously: Not Dead Yet
ChiralSoftware writes "Remember John Gilmore's fight to be able to travel on commercial airlines without having to show ID? It has dropped out of the news for a while, but now it appears that the fight is continuing. I remember in the 80s we used to make jokes about Soviet citizens being asked "show me your papers" and needing internal passports to travel in their own country. Now we need internal passports to travel in our country. How did this happen? The requirement to show ID for flying on commercial passenger flights started in 1996, in response to the crash of TWA Flight 800. This crash was very likely caused by a mechanical failure. How showing ID to board a plane prevents mechanical failures is left as an exercise to the reader. How mandatory ID even prevents terrorist attacks is also not clear to me; all the 9/11 hijackers had valid government-issued ID. I hope the courts don't wimp out on this fight."
I know /.ers tend to believe there is a conspiracy behind every bush, but there isn't in this case. The requirement (and the reason you can't change seats *after* boarding an airplane) is purely (as another said) to identify the corpses. Its for the insurance companies and pending lawsuits etc. It has *nothing* to do with the Patriot Act, your removal of civil liberties or anything else.
Karma: Neutered
Vote with your wallet. I don't fly unless absolutely positively there is no other way to get to there from here in a reasonable time frame. Otherwise, I avoid airports. They consume my time and have wasteful, feelgood 'security measures' which actually provide no security at all.
The last straw for me was having my shoes searched three times on the way to a plane. I was wearing a pair of sneakers. No metal in there.
Government mandated security measures in airports are geared to one goal, and one goal only - maintaining the status quo in the airline industry. It's an attempt to construct a valid excuse for the next hijacking. "After all, we made you show ID and confiscated your 3/4" long insulin needles, don't blame us."
Security professionals my ass, they don't have a chance in hell of catching a committed hijacker either before 9/11 or now. Get people used to that idea and stop with the stupid 'security' crap. You can also die on your morning commute to a truck driver snorting crank. Get a grip, death is all around us. You could drop dead reading this post. Really.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
If you have to present ID that matches the name on the ticket then you cannot resell the ticket. It used to be the case that people would resell tickets they couldn't use. Now, depending on the type of ticket you didn't use, your money is either gone, locked in an airline account with one year to spend it on another ticket, back in your hands less 25%, or some other such "arrangement".
The airlines fight tooth and nail to prevent the expense of new "security" measures. If one is accepted it usually means that someone, somewhere is making solid profit on the scheme.
Neither the soap box, ballot box, jury box or ammo box is of any value at this time and will only become less so in the future.
The soap box is buried in the "Society of the Spectacle", the ballot box is rigged by the two-party system, the jury box is rigged by definition - it IS the fucking state, for Christ's sake - and the ammo box is only useful if you can get enough people to take it up - which you can't because the soap box is buried, etc.
Wait for nanotech and do the job right.
My prediction: Gilmore is going to LOSE - big time.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Maybe I'm naive, but I think it's at least slightly possible that people in the government are trying to make it harder for thousands of people to be blown up.
Yes, you ARE naive. A perfect example is the CAPSII system of profiling suspects to search at the airport instead of a blanket random search. It's mathematically provable that the CAPS2 system is LESS secure and has a gaping fundamental loophole that terrorists can exploit that random sampling does not. But, to the ignorant, profiling SOUNDS much safer, since all the dark-skinned poor people can be pulled out of line and harassed, so it was enacted by the government.
(For mor information go look here)
And a personal anecdote: I was flying home from Japan once, and was searched 6 times during that adventure. The entire time I had a hermetically sealed biohazard box given to me by a hospital worker to put my home-made super-hot hot-sauce in, complete with all sorts of biohazard flowers and warnings that the content was amazingly dangerous. It wasn't some joke box, it was the real deal from a real AIDS hospital that a friend nursed at. This was looked at and passed over by not less than 15 different people who did not open it or even look twice.
They did take away my Korean chopsticks (made of metal, but not sharp or anything).
Your government is not trying to protect you at all. They ARE trying to offer you the slight illusion of protection and betting on the fact that the 9/11 events were a fluke.
Apart from the issue that a suicide bomber dies on that particular flight, do you really think the guy really has to fly a lot first in order to get acquainted with planes so he could be a more effective suicide bomber?
...sounds like a great security publicity ploy - until you start thinking about the fact that terrorists will hardly ever tout their training (so you won't know whether the guy HAD the training or not -- actually, their plans would probably even hinge on the fact that you don't know. All the while you're harassing people, who like me, learnt to operate automatic weapons as part of their compulsory military service (i..e people who even had little choice about whether they WANTED to learn this or not)...
It's nonsense... Also - depending on what people do, you might flag them for totally harmless things (i.e. what do you do if Hassan Al Brahimi is actually a consultant often flying between different cities staying at those for sometimes and afternoon, sometimes a couple of weeks.
Flagging people is just bound to cause a major fuck up sooner or later.
Also, for a while, the Department for Homeland security was apparently contemplating on whether they should color-code passengers according to their threat potential. One of their ideas was that (non-US) people known to have had training on automatic weapons should be chained to their seats for the duration of the flight...
Personally, I've struck the US off my list of potential holiday destinations, until the whole patridiot act mess has been resolved (and removed). In the meantime, I will not even entertain job offers that might require me to go to the US - I'm simply sick of the kind of paranoia the Bush government is celebrating...
As expressed by Utah Phillips:
"Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free."
It's nothing of the sort. The purpose of a driver's license is not track your whereabouts, it's a license to drive. When you pull out of your driveway and go to work, is there somebody waiting there to check your ID and ask where you are going?
Then again, this could come in handy. I think I'm going to tell my boss that I have a right to make over $200,000 a year.
I love this type of argument -- I call it the "Hey, let's draw a completely stupid and unjustified analogy and hope the other guy just doesn't notice" method.
Think of it like pain. Each person has a different threshold for pain. There are some things which one person barely feels at all, which another person would experience as terrible pain.
Tolerance for intrusions into our private lives is also a variable, like tolerance for pain. Some of us guard our privacy quite closely, while others seem willing to publish all the details of their most private thoughts right out in public (witness LiveJournal).
You're simply one of the people with a very high tolerance for privacy intrusion. The problem is, right now the entire country is on Privacy Morphine from the 9/11 attacks and the events in Iraq. It's much easier to buy the line of bullshit that we must give up more and more rights in exchange for protection against threats like that.
As any drug user can tell you, it's really stupid to make important decisions while doped, and here we are, the United States, making the decision to toss away all the things we enjoy about our lives in exchange for barely any real security at all. And one day I think you'll hit that threshold where you suddenly realize "I can't tolerate this level of government intrusion," but by then it will be too late. The drugs the United States is taking are some strong ones, and the kinds of decisions that are being made are not the kind that can easily be backed out of.
Another "truth" that will not die, like Al Gore saying he invented the internet.
Dean was screaming to be heard above the noise of the crowd. Unfortunately, the microphone he was screaming into had a filter for ambient noise. It was impossible to hear anyone else but Dean.
When the sound of the crowd was mixed back into the recording, recreating what actually could be heard, Dean was barely audible.
It would have been the work of minutes for any network reporter to get the correctly mixed version of the audio. But they didn't. Only Diane Sawyer ever apologized for the lynching after she heard the corrected track.
It was too much fun for the networks, the rightwing cable pundits, the network executives threatened by Dean's pledge to break up their growing empires, the late night comedians- even John Stewart: come on, John you're smarter than this! - to slaughter Dean, whom the majority of the pundits disliked because he said things that caused massive cognitive dissonance in their unbelieveably uninformed minds.
Now we've Kerry, who won't even condemn Bush's straight-out lying about WMD's. Dean had the balls to tell the truth. Now he's been Gored, reduced to a joke because reporters simply would not be bothered to find out about filtering mics. Immense momentum killed by laziness and a willingness to kill the messenger.