[Infowarrior] - The Great No-ID Airport Challenge

[Richard Forno]

The Great No-ID Airport Challenge
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71115-0.html
By Ryan Singel| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Jun, 09, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO -- Jim Harper left his hotel early Thursday morning at 5:30
a.m. to give himself more than two hours to clear security at San
Francisco's International Airport. It wasn't that he was worried the
security line would be long, but because he accepted a dare from civil
liberties rabble-rouser John Gilmore to test whether he could actually fly
without showing identification.

Gilmore issued the challenge at Wednesday's meeting of the Homeland
Security's privacy advisory committee in San Francisco, which otherwise
lacked much in the way of controversy. An entrepreneur and co-founder of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Gilmore recently lost a court battle seeking
to unmask the government's secret regulations asking passengers to show
identification when flying, and to have those rules declared
unconstitutional.

Scolding the DHS committee for dithering over small matters, Gilmore said
that it should be investigating the NSA's eavesdropping program and that the
committee's real job was to "protect the homeland from mean-spirited
officials."

Gilmore then dared committee members to place their driver's licenses in the
envelopes he had passed out, mail them to their home addresses and then
attempt to fly home without identification.

While signs in the airport and on the TSA website insist that showing ID is
mandatory, the official policy, as revealed by the judges' decision (.pdf)
in Gilmore's case, is that "airline passengers either present identification
or be subjected to a more extensive search." But Gilmore said that's not
what really happens in an airport when one refuses to provide
identification.

"You will find out what the real rules are," Gilmore said. "Are you afraid
to? You have good reason."

Gilmore referred to his own experience when Southwest Airlines refused to
let him fly in 2002 without identification, and a recent blog post by travel
expert Edward Hasbrouck, chronicling his near-arrest for trying to figure
out if the person checking identification at Washington Dulles was an
airline or federal employee.

At the meeting's close, Harper, a committee member, said he'd take the
challenge so long as he could hand his envelope to a reporter who
accompanied him to the airport. He also challenged the other members to join
him.

"We have influence," Harper said. "I challenge my colleagues to believe in
the law."

None of the other committee members volunteered, but the committee's chair,
former director of consumer protection for the Federal Trade Commission
Howard Beales gave Harper a tongue-in-cheek blessing.

"I wish Jim the best and hope to see you in the future," Beales said.

At 6:00 a.m. the next morning, Harper handed this reporter a green
self-addressed stamped envelope and entered the checkpoint line, which even
at that early hour was filled with travelers facing a 20 minute crawl to the
magnetometers.

Harper told the identification checker he had no ID, and the attendant
quickly wrote "No ID" with a red marker on his ticket and shunted him off to
an extra screening line -- generously allowing him to bypass the longer
queue of card-carrying passengers.

There Harper was directed into the belly of a GE EntryScan puffer machine
which shot bits of air at his suit in order to see if he had been handling
explosives.

TSA employees wearing baby blue surgical gloves then swiped his Sidekick and
his laptop for traces of explosives and searched through his carry-on, while
a supervisor took his ticket, conferred with other employees and made a
phone call.

Meanwhile, a TSA employee approached this reporter, who was watching the
search through Plexiglas, and said, "It's pretty awkward you are standing
here taking notes," but he did not ask for identification or call for a halt
to the note-taking.

The TSA supervisor returned from her phone call and asked Harper why he
didn't have identification and to where he was traveling. But she was
satisfied enough with his answer -- that he had mailed his driver's license
home to Washington D.C. -- that she allowed him to pass.

At 6:30 a.m., standing 50 yards away on the other side of the glass screen,
Harper phoned to say he now had two hours to kill, having gotten through
screening perhaps even faster than he would have if he'd shown ID. He
guessed he was able to get through without much hassle by being polite and
dressing well.

Why did he take the challenge?

"Part of it was my concern with the growing use of identification checks to
control access to society, such as buildings, stadiums and air travel,"
Harper said, referring to issues that are central to his recently published
book called Identity Crisis.

And will he do it again?

"Yeah, I'm inclined to do it more and more and hopefully more people will
follow my lead and it will become a clear option to not show government ID
to fly," Harper said. "My identity has nothing to do with the real risk.

"In fact, today, I'm the safest guy on the plane."