Millionaire John Gilmore's fight against a national ID

John Gilmore is a dot com millionaire that considers himself "under regional arrest" due to his inabillity to travel without a federally approved ID.
For Gilmore, it's a matter of privacy that he's willing to take to the highest court.
That high court however, may not be allowed to hear the case because the law may be above the review of The Supreme Court.(?)


Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy
He's unable to travel because he refuses to present a government-approved ID
Sunday, February 27, 2005

By Dennis Roddy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

<excerpt>
SAN FRANCISCO -- John Gilmore's splendid isolation began July 4, 2002, when, with defiance aforethought, he strolled to the Southwest Airlines counter at Oakland Airport and presented his ticket.

The gate agent asked for his ID.

Gilmore asked her why.

It is the law, she said.

Gilmore asked to see the law.

Nobody could produce a copy. To date, nobody has. The regulation that mandates ID at airports is "Sensitive Security Information." The law, as it turns out, is unavailable for inspection.

What started out as a weekend trip to Washington became a crawl through the courts in search of an answer to Gilmore's question: Why?

<snip>
Gilmore has epilepsy, and because of that his driver's license was suspended five years ago. He decided not to reapply because it is now easier, when asked for a photo ID, to be able to say forthrightly that he has none.

<snip>
Gilmore's famous visit to two airline ticket counters in the Bay Area was charted out. He checked in with his lawyer. He kept notes. He booked a flight from Oakland, with its slightly cheaper fares, to Washington, D.C., where he planned to drop in on the offices of his member of congress, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, to convey his growing concern about the amount of data the government is gathering from and about its citizens.

<snip>
As Gilmore tells it, he arrived at the gate two hours early, a paper ticket purchased through a travel agent in his hand. A Southwest agent asked for his ID. Gilmore, in turn, asked her if the ID requirement was an airline rule or a government rule. She didn't seem to know. Gilmore argued that if nobody could show him the law, he wasn't showing them an ID.

<snip>
When John Gilmore demanded proof that the airport ID rule met Constitutional muster, the government at first declined to acknowledge it even existed.

Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for TSA, tacitly acknowledged the strange rabbit hole into which Gilmore has fallen. The Department of Justice, in its first response to Gilmore's suit two years ago, declined to acknowledge whether such an instruction existed. Later, it admitted its existence. Then the government asked a judge to hold a hearing in secret and preclude Gilmore's lawyers from seeing the regulation they sought to challenge, the contents of which seem to be pretty widely known.

<entire article including a facinating bio>
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05058/462446.stm

So, what is the answer to Gilmore's question? What purpose does it serve?

....a government policy of "secret laws" that are not reviewable goes against the grain of our very foundation.

I think too, that this battle is aimed at preventing or forestalling the day that "traveling papers" will be required when leaving your house. (Already, law enforcement needs no overt reason to ask for your identification due to a court ruling late last year).

The advent of a "National ID" program has brought that day to within our foreseeble future.

It's a battle that's not only unwinnable, but actually "unfightable" by anyone without Gilmore's resources.

"May I see your papers please"....."Everything seems in order, you may go" used to be a cheesy line from WWII movies.

If you want more detail on Gilmore's case check out http://www.papersplease.org/gilmore /

Didn't know he started this on the 4th of July

i guess my question is -- is it too late?
aren't we in a period that is ''post private'' already?

what i've known since viet nam is that government compiles {illegal} data on anyone it chooses.

anybody with a credit card knows that huge amounts of private information are compiled all the time -- so what's private?
my focus has mostly been on medical information -- because that's seemed to be a reasonable line in the sand this late in the game.

i wonder how this will all turn out?

He was a 60s Berkeley free speech radical. He is quoted on
camera in a major documentary on the Free Speech movement.

And he is not just any dot.commer. He was (still is) one of the
main players at Sun Microsystems. He introduced Java to the
world (not that he invented it - don't want to Al Gore him).

More power to Gilmore; but we are definitely screwed. Secret
laws that cannot be revealed, Comrade Giilmore. All for the
security of the fatherland.

arendt

I couldn't add any to the post 'cause it was too long as it was.

I was reading it asking myself "Is this guy Forrest Gump?"