Boggie Dog

I do not agree with ID checking by TSA but I don't understand how ID checking by the airline provides revenue protection.

Say I purchase an airline ticket and for some reason can't travel. I give the ticket to Joe who uses that ticket. The seat sold is used and the airline does not benefit either way.

So what am I missing here? Selling the same seat twice? If my ticket cannot be refunded I would not cancel my reservation so it would only be available at the check in cutoff point. Then most likely made available to a stand by flyer.

Spiff

What the airlines don't want is you buying up the few cheapo seats offered on a flight and selling them at a higher price.

And the airlines do make money on spoilage: you buy a ticket and can't fly but the airline keeps your money and might even sell the seat again anyway (overbooking).

In no case should the government check IDs. That should be strictly up to the airlines.

Trollkiller

You give too much credit to the thinking processes of those that make the rules/laws. The reason why an expired license is not sufficient to provide ID really has nothing to do with recycling or identity theft.

The simple matter is it is easier to narrow down what is acceptable (valid ID) than it is to list all the possible exceptions. Unfortunately for regular folks the only time an ID is invalid is when it expires. D'oh!

chollie

Every time I look at the title of this thread it strikes me: how can anyone mention TSA and the Constitution in the same breath?

It's more like: "TSA or the Constitution".

pmocek

That a person no longer has the permissions that come with a valid passport should have no effect on the utility of the passport -- the document -- as proof of identity. Similarly, when someone's license to drive expires, the document that was issued (the wallet card; the thing people loosely refer to as the license) is still just as useful for identification purposes as it was the moment before it expired.

However, our ability to judge whether a particular document of this sort is authentic or not, relative to our ability to judge the authenticity of new documentation, diminishes over time as we make improvements to the documents we issue. A driver license card that was created many years ago is very likely to be easier to alter or forge than one that was created more recently regardless of its expiration date. And as you suggested, a person's appearance changes over time, making a photograph of him or her less useful with time.

So I think it is sensible to consider these documents too old to be useful at some point in time. For example, consider an expired driver license from a time before photographs were included on the card: That old card is as useful as it ever was, but newer ones are so much more useful than the old one that it's reasonable for us to "raise the bar" and discredit the old one. But again, to consider these documents completely useless for identification the moment they expire -- given the current norm for length of time from issuance to expiration -- seems absurd to me.

I'm more concerned that this focus on whether an expired document is "sufficient proof of identity for domestic air travel" is harmful. A government requirement that someone prove his identity to government agents prior to travel is an infringement upon that person's liberty. In my mind, there is no such thing as "sufficient proof of identity for domestic air travel" because proof of identity is simply not necessary. A complete lack of proof of identity is sufficient for domestic air travel.


Such a policy would be very misleading. The meaning of "screening" varies greatly, so I'll assume that for the purpose of this discussion, when you wrote "screening" you meant "search for dangerous items". You've suggested that we allow people to avoid a thorough search for dangerous items if they identify themselves, and thus that identification and searches for dangerous items provide similar improvements to air travel safety. Clearly, they do not.

This is precisely the policy that was in effect a year ago. See my first post at FT for information about my experiences pressing this issue. TSA's airport identification policy changed on June 21, 2008.

Under our present system, that which went into effect in June of 2008, people are not barred from travel for failure to present credentials at a TSA checkpoint if they say their credentials were misplaced or stolen, verbally identify themselves, and cooperate with an interrogation.

Yes. I want this every time I travel by commercial air. Our government presently bars us from doing so because it would prevent them from arbitrarily restricting our freedom of movement using blacklists or otherwise.

TSA's current practices make us less free.

Trollkiller

The reason why screenings were first enacted was an attempt to prevent hijackings. Most passengers did not mind the extra intrusion if it saved a trip to some third world hole. The screenings were done by either a private company or the airline personnel. If you had a problem with a screener you had recourse with the company that hired them. All in all a pretty good system.

After 9/11 the claim of a secure airspace was tossed in to justify the enormous amounts of money being thrown into the freshly minted DHS and TSA. Sad fact is the TSO do as good or worse than the private screeners.

jkhuggins

Right now, because my name is on the ticket, and I have to prove that I am the person named on the ticket, I can't resell the ticket to anyone else. Twenty years ago, before presenting IDs was required, you could always fly under someone else's ticket, as long as your gender matched the gender of the name on the ticket (and you were willing to lie and call yourself by the name on the ticket when you checked in).

The reason this is significant is that, with the way that airline seats are currently sold, just about every seat on an aircraft is sold at a different price. Being able to buy tickets and resell them creates the opportunity to have a secondary market for plane tickets. Obviously, the airlines aren't interested in allowing such secondary markets to exist, since that would allow others to profit off of the service the airline provides.

FWAAA

Not exactly.

Let's review history. Until the first Gulf War in 1991, I never showed ID to any airline or security checkpoint. For a brief time, airlines were ordered by the FAA to demand ID of all passengers. So I showed ID at the ticket counter. Not at the checkpoints. After the brief Gulf War ended, so did the ID checks. My airline of choice (AA) did not again request ID until the summer of 1996.

Why 1996? When TWA 800 blew up, the Al Gore-led commission was certain that curbside checkin and lack of mandated ID contributed to the disaster, so once again, airlines were ordered by the FAA to demand ID (and curbside checkin was suspended for a while). So once again, ID was requested at the ticket counter. Not at security checkpoints.

The ID requirement was not rescinded even after it was determined that TWA 800 blew up on its own, not because ID-less passengers used curbside checkin.

In 2001, airlines still demanded ID from passengers. The FAA required that airlines demand ID.

Airlines did come to learn the revenue protection that ID provides - but airlines generally did not demand ID from 1991-1996 when no government mandate existed and only reinstated ID requirements when ordered by the FAA in 1996. Since then, airlines have been required to demand ID of passengers and at no time since 1996 have airlines been freed of that requirement.

On September 11, 2001, the 19 hijackers complied with the ID requirements.

Later that day, Secretary of Transportation, Norman "POS" Mineta announced that travelers would henceforth have to endure more "random identification checks" at the airport:

http://www.dot.gov/affairs/dot9301.htm

pmocek

FWAAA, thanks for the thorough history. Could you please clarify in which situations identification was demanded and in which situations it was requested? I'm almost positive that I have read that there were times during which airlines were required to request but not to require that passengers identify themselves.

I believe we conflate the two because often, in an attempt to seem polite, people make a request that would, is not granted, become a demand. In fact, people are often manipulated by police officers into doing things they need not do because the officer requests something that he does not have the authority to demand.

NY-FLA

Incorrect on at least 2 counts, at least for domestic itins.
1) Of course you can transfer the ticket to someone else. If you have a ticket that I wanted to use, I could easily use any number of methods to get to the "sterile side" of the airport, and then board the plane using your BP in almost all circumstances, at will. Most sheeple in the general populace are scared that the TSA will find out, and arrest them. Most on here are too wise for that concern.
2) Re: your 20 years ago gender issue: Mrs. NY-FLA and I used to book tickets on Eastern, hence 20 years ago, as (single initial) NY-FLA so we could credit both of our flying to a single FF account. This never created an issue. Given the current low level of BP checking right at boarding, I would be confident that 1) above could be used cross-gender, even now, in the vast majority of cases.

I still believe that the only function ID checking currently serves is revenue protection. It's effective because the T Stazi A, along with some bullying by the airlines, has cowed the majority of the flying customers into submission.

FliesWay2Much

...and don't forget the silly next-of-kin forms they started requiring for all overseas flights. Again, all of the sheelpe gladly complied and wrote out names, addresses, and phone numbers for spouses, friends, and relatives. Don't worry...the government made the airlines destroy all of the lists right after the plane landed safely.

For a while, the airlines tried to made the next-of-kin data mandatory. If I lost the ballte of informing the counter agent politely that NOK was voluntary, I reluctantly agreed and listed one of four favorite cousins: Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Jerome (Curly) Howard, or Alfred E. Neuman. It was interesting -- they all lived together at the same address: 880 River Ave, Bronx, NY 10451 (Yankee Stadium).

law dawg

That I know and understand. The plane can be taken out of the country whereas it's a lot harder to drive a bus to Cuba.

But what about bombs and the like? Why is the public safety aspect much more important on a plane rather than a bus or ship or boat, unless we're talking about bombs in US airspace?

Trollkiller

The public safety aspect is not much more important with a plane. If we started getting a rash of bus hijackings you can believe that security on those things would change too.

Although the TSA would like to assume that any terrorist use of an airplane would kill 3000 people, the reality is that is just not the case.