blog » March 4, 2005/Secret Laws

July 4, 2002, Independence Day in the United States, when Americans celebrate their freedom. Yet on that day, John Gilmore, the millionaire founder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and employee 5 at Sun Microsystems, got a demonstration of how Americans are losing their freedoms. (/.) As he tried to board a plane, ticket in hand, the gate agent asked for ID. When he asked why, the agent said that it was the law. He asked to see the law, but nobody was able to produced it. And three years later, nobody has produced it yet. In fact, the law is apparently "Sensitive Security Information".

To clarify, this isn’t about having to show ID before boarding a plane (although that was the issue in the beginning). I’ve complained many times here on my blog about airport security being useless, how it’s still easy to get a bomb or cutting instrument into the gate area, how the rules don’t actually help anything, and so on. And I’ll rant about that again in the future, I promise.

The big issue here is that Americans are subject to a law (or, as it seems, several laws) that they are not allowed to read. The government is imposing rules on the people while refusing to tell the people what the rules are. How then is one supposed to know if he or she is following the rules? How is one able to ensure that the rules are constitutional? It seems like the United States is losing its checks and balances, and getting closer to a totalitarian regime.

By the way, the best line from the article: “ When techies burn out, they tend not to do strange things. They are, by nature, already a few degrees off plumb. So they revert to the ordinary.”