. . . muttered the ogre

Plaintiff’s Consolidated Opposition to Defendants’ Motions to Dismiss in Gilmore v Ashcroft. Related items here. John Gilmore is challenging the secret regulation which supposedly requires passengers to either show an official annotated photograph (internal passport) or submit to search.

As things stand now, it seems the only ways to travel with one’s privacy rights intact are on foot (forbidden on most highways), on a bicycle (ditto), on a horse (?), or in a chartered private vehicle (putting the burden of identification on the driver/pilot).

An interesting item from the faq:

In 2000, scheduled air carriers carried almost 632 million passengers. If the same number of passengers fly in 2002, but instead of arriving at the airport 30 minutes before their flights, they arrive 2 hours before their flights, those passengers will have collectively spent more than 100,000 years sitting uselessly in airports or standing in line to be searched.

Contrast this to the lost lives of the people who died in the 9/11 attacks. If each of the approximately 3,300 people who died lost 35 years that they would have otherwise lived, then in total they lost about the same amount of time. Government-imposed searches waste as much life every year as the lifetimes that the attack wasted.