Last week, Missouri state representative Jim Guest helped make outlawing the Real ID Act a step closer to reality in Missouri. The piece of legislation that he helped to introduce, House Bill 1716, will effectively ban the act in the state of Missouri if signed into law. While this might cause some stress for Missourians who will not have valid licenses come May 11 when the Act goes into affect, this is still quite significant.
As of now, 26 states have passed resolutions that’s either against Real ID or strictly bans it. If passed, Missouri will join 7 states that have banned the Act altogether. If you’re against Real ID and don’t live in one of the 26 that have protested the legislation, never fear. There is a loophole that The Kansas City Star graciously pointed out last week.
Thanks to a discovery by Phillip Mocek of Seattle, Washington, it turns out that you ‘don’t need no stinking ID.’ There is a loophole in the requirement that passengers show some form of ID when they’re at the airport. If you genuinely don’t have it, they’ll let you board the plane; with one exception.
The only catch is that additional searches are necessary in order to gain clearance to fly. A small price to pay for the freedom to move freely throughout the country without the government tracking your movements.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Rep. Jim Guest got this all started way back when he founded Legilsators Against REAL ID (LARI), back when most folks had no idea what he was talking about. This added a Republican plank in the opposition, so it was not just libertarians fighting it; he and Missouri deserve Kudos as much as Maine, New Hampshire, S. Carolina, and Montana do. Kudos to Schweitzer and Sanford as well. A good website to check out how Republicans finally caught on to all this is http://realidwatch.blogspot.com/
May 9th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
You wrote, “There is a loophole in the requirement that passengers show some form of ID when they’re at the airport. If you genuinely don’t have it, they’ll let you board the plane; with one exception.”
Actually, it’s not a loophole, and whether you actually have ID or not does not matter. There is no requirement that travelers show ID to government agents before boarding a domestic flight in the United States. I received notice of such from
Jeanne Oliver, Associate Director, TSA Office of the Executive Secretariat in March, 2008. A PDF of that document is available in a post to the Identity Project blog (”ID Still Not Required To Fly” March 31, 2008).
Interestingly, as recently as December, 2007, TSA signs at the Kansas City International Airport inaccurately state otherwise.
Also, note that while the Kansas City Star article (“Although airport security tells passengers they must show ID to board planes, they really don’t,” Scott Canon and Mike Rice, Kansas City Star, April 9, 2008) has been removed from their Web site, the story is also available at the Seattle Times and also at the Arizona Daily Star.
Requiring us to present our papers to a government agent who will determine based on our identities whether or not we may travel would be equivalent to requiring us to request permission to travel. (Thankfully, there is still no requirement that passengers on domestic flights identify themselves to TSA agents.) As long as I am not carrying anything dangerous, the United States government should get out of the way and leave whether or not I’ll be flying up to me and the airline with whom I have contracted to transport me to my destination.
Paraphrasing words of The Identity Project: No matter how sophisticated the security embedded into an I.D., a well-funded criminal will be able to falsify it. Honest people, however, go to Pro-Life rallies. Honest people go to Pro-Choice rallies, too. Honest people attend gun shows. Honest people protest the actions of the President of the United States. Honest people fly to political conventions. What if those with the power to put people on a ‘no fly’ list decided that they didn’t like the reason for which you wanted to travel? The honest people wouldn’t be going anywhere.
Over 900,000 names are now on the United States’ so-called “terrorist watch list”. Presumably, the people named on that list have neither done wrong nor attempted to do wrong, or else they would be arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced by a judge to punishment for their wrongdoing. If someone’s name is placed on the list, there is no way for him to find out why it was placed there and there is no process for appealing the decision to place it there. Placement on the list is an administrative punishment dealt anonymously.
August 15th, 2008 at 4:53 am
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!