Originally Posted by Bart
Gilmore's claim that he was denied freedom of movement was also rejected. The Ninth Circuit Court found that the Constitution does not guarantee the right to travel by a particular mode of transportation. Gilmore was free to travel to his destination by another means of transportation.
Personally, I would fault this part of the decision as one of the weakest parts of the Court's written opinion. The Court didn't really discuss the arguments and counter-arguments here; it just stated a position, without really laying out the reasoning. (For instance, what is the legal standard when restrictions on travel do become too cumbersome? If all buses and trains start imposing the same policy as airplanes, does that go over the line? What if it is also imposed on all automated forms of transportation, so that the only remaining unencumbered form of transportation left is to walk? Would that be legal?)
I thought the text of the decision was generally pretty decent (in the sense that it was written in a way to lay out the arguments in a way intended to help even skeptics -- even those who don't agree with the Court's decision -- to understand the Court's reasoning), but this was one of the weak points of the decision. Disappointingly, I thought it was also one of the more interesting and non-obvious legal parts of the case. I was very curious about how the court would approach the question of when restraint on transportation goes so far that it becomes impermissible, so I was disappointed that that the decision didn't address these issues.
Gilmore challenged the policy in court. He followed the process of presenting a legal challenge and having that challenge decided based upon case law and legal precedent. Many of you may not agree with the decision, and that's fine. [..] There is no loss of freedom here, my friend.
I was in complete agreement, until you got to the last sentence. What the court ruled is that the policy does not violate the Constitution. The court didn't make any claims about whether there is a loss of freedom here. There are plenty of ways we can lose freedom without any violation of the Constitution ever occurring. The two are not the same.
As for secret regulations, I have to disagree with you. There are some procedures and policies which have to be protected from public disclosure and disseminated on a strict need-to-know basis. However, many of the procedures followed by TSA are, by design, public information.
The rule requiring ID has never been made public -- not even in a redacted form. Now just why is it that the FAA can't show us the part of the directive that (we're told) requires the airlines to ask for photo ID? I can't see any good reason to hide that.
(I once managed to get my hands on an accompanying guidance document that the FAA sent to airlines, providing guidance on how they should implement the requirements. I've read the entire thing, and there is no reason the FAA couldn't have released that guidance document, too. So why haven't they? The only explanation I can hypothesize is that they are opposed to transparency, and make up some kind of bogus "security" excuse to let them do what they want to do without the nuisance of public oversight.)
I don't have a problem if experts decide that some of the TSA's internal processes and procedures genuinely need to be kept secret. But when the FAA issues regulation, with the force of law, that imposes requirements on passengers -- requirements that arguably, potentially might affect the civil liberties of passengers -- why the heck can't they make this public, at the very least in redacted format? Secret law is counter to democratic principles.
By the way, I believe the problem agency here is the FAA, not the TSA, though I'm not 100% certain about that.