unsettling signals.

this caught my eye. it's a very long article, so i may quote some stuff here. but it's set my mind running in several different directions at once, so this will probably be a disorganized post.

the first thing i see is, there's something of a distinction between being asked to present your id to travel within the country, and being asked to present a driver's license to rent a car. you see, cars are big, expensive, heavy objects that can kill people. so naturally, we like to be assured that anyone who drives a car has reached some expected standard of skill. therefore, if you run a car rental company, you want to be sure that someone you're giving one of your cars to has attained this skill level. in this circumstance, asking to see a driver's license does not to me seem unreasonable. it's not that you're demanding identification and stashing it in a government database as with airlines, you just want to make sure that this person is not going to a) wreck your expensive machinery b) kill someone c) kill themselves. the same applies for a police officer pulling you over at a traffic stop.

if she had been smart, the gate agent would have told him that the airline has to protect themselves against people suing them when someone steals their ticket. although that still wouldn't explain the database entry.

this is a major point, though:

"Privacy discourse ends up being at one end, 'What have you got to hide?' vs. 'Mind your own business,' " Tien said.

a favorite line is "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear." well, the problem is that human history proves that that's not true. and on the other side, why should the government have to know exactly where you are at all times? i mean, really. they have a mailing address for you. if you're not committing a crime, there's no reason for the government to know where you are. what should we grant them that right? one of his strongest arguments would be that we know that the sept 11 hijackers had driver's licenses. we know what seats they were sitting in on the plane, for fuck's sake.

that's the silliest part about the whole "9/11" thing. after it happened, the government rushed around attempting the CYA trick, and instead enacted a police state for themselves. i mean, what were the major changes to air travel? 1) no more curbside check-in. the hijackers parked in the parking garage. 2) you have to show id at check-in. the terrorists had driver's licenses. 3) you can no longer idle your car outside the terminal to pick up passengers. see 1)

so all that did is inconvenience a lot of legitimate travelers, and even if those restrictions had been in place prior to the attack, they wouldn't have done anything anyway.

the social security number is another thing. there are many times when i wish i could ask someone isn't there another form of identification they could use? but organizations are lazy, and the SSN is easy.

and, you know, i'm not a millionaire. i need to feed myself and pay my mortgage and have a cellphone (what did we do before cellphones? well, as i remember, we had a much less mobile society in general). i'm not in a position to demand that my cellphone company stop using my social as my PIN. and i'm certainly not in a position to point out how utterly ridiculous it is to use the SSN as your identification for your financial credit. or medical history, of all things. those of us caught in the system can't actually do a lot in the way of fighting it. so i guess i'm posting to my blog instead of insisting my cellphone company doesn't need a government issued id to give me service, as long as i'm paying them, dammit. however, i do encourage everyone to check out and support the EFF. and maybe at least think about it the next time someone demands id, think about exactly what they're going to do with it, why they want it, and who else could get a hold of it.

To some, Gilmore's argument is redolent of the conspiracy theories from the black helicopter crowd.

"That's the problem. How it sounds," Gilmore said. He waved his hands like some Cassandra: "They have all these secret laws! The UFOs are coming! They have guards at every airport!" Yes, he said, there is a certain odd flavor to the notion that someone shouldn't have to show ID to board a plane, but with magnetometers at the gates, guards with security wands, fortified cockpit doors and sky marshals abounding, Gilmore is asking just how much citizens are giving up when they hand their driver's licenses to a third party, in this case an airline, where it is put into a database they cannot see, to meet a law that, as it turns out, they are not allowed to read.