I've often wondered what people say to the screeners to avoid the showing of ID. I usually say something along the lines of "I am refusing to show my ID for travel; please treat me as a 'no ID' passenger and refer me to secondary screening." I often get looked at cross-eyed because I think they are surprised someone knows about this, but I've had a few incidents, all in NYC airports, where I was outright harassed and refused the no ID option. Seeing as I had a flight to catch I ultimately gave in and showed ID - and was subject to some pretty thorough secondaries anyways - just so I wouldn't miss my flights, but there has to be a more consistent approach to making it through the line before anything like this will work.

As to the idea of protest, the only way for a protest to have an impact is for it to, well, have an impact. This means disrupting the daily operation of the organization(s) that are causing you harm. Sit-ins, marches, etc. all inconvenienced plenty of people who just wanted a sandwich or to drive to work or whatever, but they also gathered attention to a cause.

The problem that this effort will face is that in order to truly gather attention you need the media to help. Today's media will not listen to anything that doesn't comply with Kippie's talking points. If you called your local station and explained to them that the TSA is violating our civil rights and/or failing to comply with the Privacy Act you're not going to get air time or a couple column inches. The TSA has done such a phenomenal job with their (lying) PR machine to enforce the non-existent "ID is required to fly" rule that it will be virtually impossible to get any media outlet to publish anything going against the agency. If they're stealing stuff from our bags we can get an article about it, but nothing for them enforcing rules that don't exist. Sad, but true