I've done it quite a few times, as a way of understanding how the photo ID requirement works. What would you like to know? In my experience, yes it really was trivial to fly without ID, as long as you're prepared to go through the SSSS + dump-search experience. That was all before 9/11, so I can't guarantee things haven't changed.

In my experience, when I said that I forgot or lost my ID, they typically didn't blink an eyelash, but when I said that I have ID but was refusing to show it on privacy grounds, I frequently got a ground security coordinator (is that the right term?) treating me in an unpleasant, disapproving way and asking questions like "do you want to fly today?".

It's quite an educational experience to demand your rights like this. I knew I was in the right (I did my background research -- I even got confirmation from the FAA that I was allowed to fly selectee, if I didn't have ID). But even though I knew I was right, I still found it very difficult to resist the pressure to conform, when faced with authority that was determined to treat me as some kind of horrible person if I didn't want to show my ID. Perhaps I just have a meek personality, or perhaps I'm overly affected by disapproval from a legitimate authority figure, but I found the experience intimidating and stressful. Looking back, it doesn't make any sense why I should be so intimidated when I knew I was in the right -- when I try to write it down, it sounds downright irrational -- but I did not find it a pleasant experience. It sure was educational, though.

Right. But the airline is free to, of their own initiative, decline to transport you at their own discretion. Or, at least, that's what airline representatives have claimed to me. The problem is that airline security staff often view anyone who declines to present ID on privacy grounds as "suspicious, subversive characters" and thus might refuse transport. So if you absolutely have to get there, I would be leary of following the "don't show ID and fly selectee" route -- it might work 95% of the time, but that 5% is a ......

I don't think I'd hold my breath on this one.

Actually, wouldn't a cash payment for a ticket trigger SSSS anyway?

Please do not insult my intellect by comparing it to the 9th - what a bunch of bozo judges!

This past October, I left my house in the Midwest at 4:45 a.m. to make a flight to Arizona for a deposition at 12:00 noon PST. When I arrived at the airport parking lot I realized that I left my wallet with driver's license and credit cards at home. I checked in at the ticket counter, which was no problem because I had earlier booked the flight and have status with American. The boarding pass had the SSSS marking on the corners, but that secondary was no more intensive than the many others TSA has performed over the past 40 or so months. For this trip I had only my briefcase, because I made the round trip all in one long day. In short, it is possible to fly without an ID.

Exactly my point.

However, just because some action is possible, and because a government agency takes that action, does not automatically make that action correct. The additional search because no ID is presented presumes that ID adds an appreciable positive element to security. If memory serves correctly, all 19 terrorists on 9/11 presented IDs at the checkpoints. The supposedly defective screening process detected boxcutters on some of these slimes who presented IDs. So much for showing IDs.

Incorrect. Based on the overall security procedures in place on 9/11, they were able to fly on that date.

Procedures in place now as a multilayered web would likely have disrupted their plans entirely or significantly. At the very least, it would have introduced operational risk at a level to them that would have changed their approach ina way that elevated our opportunity to capture them.

Given the choice between showing ID and going through full secondary, I, personally, prefer the former.

A bigger issue is the whole SSSS charade and secondary searches without even a shred of suspicion, reasonable or otherwise. Next time it happens to me, I will file Bivens acting as my own attorney. It can be done. There are some ready to fill forms for that purpose available through Federal Courts websites.

Superb idea, and I mean that sincerely. We need a body of precedent to establish what is and is not legal.

Unlikely. Many of the 9.11 people were known to the government as threats for quite some time and they were ignored. I can't possibly believe that is not being done now. The operational risk they would suffer now is obvious: reinforced flight deck doors and passengers and crews unwilling to surrender themselves. 9.11 as a future threat is done and buried - not going to happen. Yet we still focus on it...we still fear it...it consumes our national psyche and that in itself, creates risk in other areas.

What concerns me is the unknown threat - the one we continue to ignore. Security continues to focus on passengers and their possessions while ignoring cargo. The national security apparatus is intentionally and blindly tilted towards aviation while our ports and energy facilities go unprotected.

It's business as usual in Washington. Just more money being shuffled around and lots of showmanship for the folks in the heartland (sorry, Homeland), but as far as substantive changes that are actually going to protect us from something we can't necessarily plan for or forecast? It just isn't there. Big words in governmentspeak won't make it so either.

Tonight is going to be interesting. If the entire State of the Union address continues to focus on terrorism here and terrorism there while ignoring domestic issues, the Homeland is going to start yawning. They are beginning to grow weary and tired of the same old show with little substance.

Which parts of that web do you think would have been most effective against them?

The nuclear threat, for example, is substantial. Not nearly enough is being done about that.

A few weeks ago, Primetime did an expose on how easy it was for 'students' to get access to the various nuclear facilities housed at many of our nation's colleges and universities.

I am sure of this: 90% of Americans (probably more) have absolutely no idea that many of our colleges and universities have LIVE nuclear fission reactors and other atomic technologies housed within their campuses. None of these facilities are properly guarded.

Any hue and cry come out after that broadcast? Nary a peep.

One of my professors in our international security program was talking about this not too long ago - they had gone to visit the nuclear reactor at a school around here and found that it was completely unguarded, except for maybe a night watchman who'd go on a tour every now and then.

Then there is the Soviet Union which produced 120-some portable nuclear bombs (these are the "suitcase" type). It's been able to account for 40-some of them.

There's enough loose fissile material out there to make 120,000 nuclear weapons. The cost of a nuclear attack on even a smaller sized US city is estimated to be at least $1 trillion.

But rather than work on those hard and more serious problems, let's spend our time and money attacking the privacy, rights, liberty and freedom of Americans.

Wow, Doppy! Know where I can get a crystal of cesium 130 for my rock collection cabinet? I promise to use good, thick rubber gloves and keep the dog away from it...

Yeah, it would have taken them a whole extra week to fake different IDs.

I don't want to sound too complacent about this, but nuclear bombs need to be "recharged" frequently to remain potent. They can't just sit around for years and years like conventional explosives can. In fact, when the U.S. had missiles based in Europe, the warheads had to be flown back and forth to Amarillo (the Pantex plant) periodically for this reason. The recharging process is tricky and requires access to hard-to-get, controlled materials (like beryllium, as just one example). People in the know are pretty sure that the missing Soviet bombs are no longer fissionable, but their fissile material could be used in a "dirty" bomb, of course.

Bruce

Sure, if ID were the only layer of security. It isn't. Remember CAPPS and it's variations? These profiling tools would catch the warning signs of fake identities.

Not if the fake identities are new...or foreign. It is easier than you think to create an identity that is 'off the radar', then use it for nefarious purposes.

In some cases it's much easier for them to steal an existing identity that is 'clean'; on the radar, but clean. Many a deceased person from small town America or Canada has been 'resurrected' in this way.

All these profiling systems have weaknesses that are not difficult to exploit. If someone on Flyertalk knows how to do it, I am most certain a highly trained criminal enterprise has it all figured out.

(Sigh) The whole point of CAPPS was that if an identity didn't match up with an "activity" history.. things like tax records, etc., it would be flagged for further scrutiny. The "Fredrick Forsyth" scenario you mention above is well known and taken into account by these systems. Though they are imperfect, they wouldn't be bad.

Some of this, at least as regards using public records, is dead for now. And security is the worse for it.

My memory is fuzzy, but, back in the good old days, the only place I remember presenting an ID was at the ticket counter when getting a boarding pass and being subjected to the two stupid questions about your luggage. You didn't need and ID or even a boarding pass to go through security.

One could Monday-morning quarterback the 9/11 operation until the sun turns into a red giant about whether or not post-9/11 security procedures in place on 9/11 themselves would have thwarted the operation. Clearly, there were enough people and agencies asleep at the wheel for a couple of years, any one of which could have uncovered the plot. Everything beforehand -- the much-touted "layered approach" -- in one form or another failed, so the entire anti-hijacking and civil aviation security burden that day fell to airport screeners in Portland, Newark, and Dulles. In a similar fashion, the TSA will fail if all of the layers before them fail again. The biggest difference is that there is another layer of security beyond the TSA -- the passengers, flight crews, and hardened cockpit doors.

That being said, even OBL knew the 9/11 operation was operationally risky. In fact, some have documented that OBL himself reduced the operation from 20 planes worldwide to a handful on the east coast. Since he practiced strict compartmentalized security, we will never know explicitly who knew what among the 19-20 hijackers.

I've written before on FT why I believe a 9/11-style event won't happen again, and it has nothing to do with the TSA or a no-fly list. In a nutshell, here are my major reasons, written from the perspective of a retired military officer who participated in deliberate and crisis planning:

1. OBL quickly lost the element of surprise. Flight 93 knew what was going on and fought back. The Pentagon plane passengers knew what was going on but didn't have the time to fight back. I've never read (I haven't read extensively on the 9/11 incident, -- classified or unclassified -- so I could be wrong) whether or not the people on the second WTC aircraft knew what was going on. OBL knew that 20 planes was too complicated a mission, but something tells me that he expected to retain the element of surprise through all of the 4-aircraft operation.

2. They lost the element of surprise because they terribly underestimated the robustness of our communication systems. OBL sort of understood the need to use offensive information warfare, as demonstrated by training the hijackers to turn off the transponders. But, to retain the element of surprise throughout the entire operation, which really wasn't that long in duration, he needed to conduct a highly sophisticated information warfare attack, which only the most militarily competent nations in the world can pull off (on a good day).

3. The key vulnerability they exploited -- cooperation of the crew during a hijacking -- no longer exists. In fact, the vulnerability no longer existed by the time Flight 93 was hijacked. There are numerous stories about other commercial flights in the air on 9/11 and the makeshift measures aircrews implemented in real time to protect themselves, their cockpits, and their passengers.

Back on topic, showing IDs a dozen times to every TSA officer in uniform is irrelevant if nobody does anything before and afterwards. The various lists and random secondaries are irrelevant, but persist because they are visible and get people re-elected. The major flaw with no-fly and watch lists are that they are just that: lists and not real people. Think about all of the news stories before and after 9/11 pertaining to arrests of criminals at airports before and after they flew somewhere. This happened because real policemen did real police work long before the bad guy showed up at the airport. Heck, they even had a real arrest warrant they got approved by a real judge! Showing an ID to a ticket agent or TSA moat dragon was simply irrelevant in these police operations. As a matter of fact, frequent ID checks might have made the bad guy panic resulting in a blown arrest attempt.

So, "ID or not ID" really gets back to its roots -- preventing lost revenue. For the average citizen, it's a matter of privacy. Gilmore appears to have taken the privacy issue to task, but he didn't really challenge the "only terrorists fly with no ID" linkage between presenting IDs and mandatory SSSS.

But, as I have seen first-hand, the whole construct of post-9/11 civil aviation security is so terribly broken that, in the grand scheme of things, even a Gilmore victory would have been irrelevant. Because identity theft is so easy to do and more commonplace than most of us think, anybody in the homeland security apparatus who believes that ID checks add anything beyond trivial value to the security construct is clearly smoking something.

I agree with you. But before the airlines were ordered by the FAA to demand (firmly request, whatever) photo ID from their passengers, airlines uniformly did not. And once the initial requirements expired, most airlines stopped asking for photo ID. Of course it was easier for the airlines to demand ID when they could claim that it was a government requirement.

Airlines often treat their customers poorly, but I gotta think that there'd be an airline out there willing to skip the photo ID if the government didn't require that it be requested. Sometimes they actually compete. :)

Any idiot terrorists can get his name in some commercial databases to "corroborate" his "non-threat" status as far as CAPPS is concerned. Sign up for some magazine subscriptions, join the airline's frequent flyer program, get a credit card - now you're "clear." And if the "big day" comes and you're not "clear," you know in advance so you can make the necessary adjustments.

Some of the 9/11 hijackers were selected by CAPPS, but so what? What did that do, and what would it do for us in the future?

Nobody should be getting onboard with weapons. We should be working on the fact that the TSA is no better at catching contraband than the private screeners, not scrutinizing over people who don't have a high enough credit score, diverting resources away from the primary job of looking for weapons.

Faking the credit history is not that much harder. Or the address.

Your faith in CAPPS/Secureflight is misplaced. Even TIA can be beaten.

As was just mentioned, that only covers the easily faked ID. If someone steals an existing ID (complete with history), it's not going to be caught.

"ID" does very little to promote real security.

That is the "Fredrick Forsyth" scenario , named after the author who brought it to prominence in "Day of the Jackal." It is extremely well known.

Creating a clean identity from scratch is quite easy...

1) make up a name
2) apply for a taxpayer ID number for a business with that name
3) using the name and the taxpayer ID, open an online bank account and fund it
4) using the name and taxpayer ID, apply for a few credit cards...you will get at least one approved
5) run some money through the system by charging the cards and paying them off through the online bank account

...the above gets you some visibility in the system. Now head to LA and pay about $200-$300 for a state ID card with your fake name that will allow you travel or do other activities that require ID

It's all quite easy to do...and the roadblocks are few and easy to overcome...some of them just require paying abit of cash

And how exactly will you make this date back 15 or 20 years?

Terrorists who are hell-bent on killing thousands might just resort to killing a few individuals, and then assuming their identities. There's no shortage of bums here in LA that wouldn't be missed if they suddenly disappeared.

Of course, that assumes that terrorists who are hell-bent to kill thousands of us wouldn't simply fly under their own name. Much simpler and thus far, mighty effective.

Except in the minds of those few individuals who think that the terrorists can be screened against "lists" and somehow neutralized.

Bums with long credit histories, right?

Don't need a long credit history to fly as a passenger. People fly every day with no credit (or even derogatory credit) histories. Unless you're advocating a minimum FICO score to be allowed to fly (sorry, you're under 680 - no flight for you). Only thing the credit history does (and will ever do) is serve as a flag for extra screening, and the usefulness of that wasted time requires that you assume that the screening will relieve the bum of a "prohibited item" without which their plot will be unsuccessful. One would hope that our nation's security doesn't rely on such fanciful assumptions.

The "system" does not require a 15-20 year credit history...let's get serious. I don't even have a 20 year credit history, I am not old enough.

A terrorist can get ID with a birthdate that makes them 21 or 25 and then begin applying for credit and let things churn for 14-18 months...that is enough. Also the lack of a credit history or the presence of a bad one is not a special flag - does everyone with crappy credit or no credit get on the no-fly list or get SSSS on their boarding pass? No.

14-18 months of continuous banking, credit and residency at a single address will get you two things: into the 'system' cleanly and a heck of alot of marketing junk mail.

I agree and would like to elaborate.

Imagine the number of credt inquiries this would generate. I think it is common knowledge that the number of inquiries counts against the person's credit score. In other words, excessive flying may ruin your credit if this absurd idea is ever implemented.

Another question: How does a person's credit score correlate with the likelihood of this person being a terrorist?

And back to the basic question: What does extra screening really accomplish?

Rather than answer each similar observation, I just point out that you guys are all so willing to bet so many people's lives on your assumptions.. people that, over and over, tell their legislators that they don't like the way you think. You are also misunderstanding how this web of information could be used, whether deliberately or not, I couldn't say.

We have proven methods, committed killers, and unnetworked intelligence capable of, in many cases, smoking them out. But you are so concerned about your right to not have this information available to DHS that you will merrily put everyone at risk.

We're from the government and we're here to help.

Uh-huh.

Geez, who needs a bum?

They would just have to find someone who both looks similar to one of the terrorists and looks like he/she has a decent credit score. In the country where dogs get credit cards by mail, there's no shortage of such people.

"But but.... he had ID!"

Actually no.

What several people have pointed out to you is that it's trivial to either invent ID or simply steal it from someone--and the idea that you need to go as far as getting a passport is unrealistic.

All this networked intelligence will do is unncessarily invade the privacy of innocent Americans, or get every person with a vaguely Arab name onto the no-fly list (without any hope of ever getting it removed), all while providing exactly zero security benefit.

Oh please. :rolleyes:

Everybody is at risk everytime they get on the plane. The only way to be absolutely safe is not to fly.

DHS doesn't need my information. It doesn't need yours, or anyone else's. It's none of their business if I'm not breaking the law. If it does need it, they can always go to court and get a subpoena for it and then arrest me if I'm that much of a threat. If giving them your info makes you feel better, go ahead.

Giving the information to DHS just creates additional risks while not doing anything for safety. Especially if that information is in the hands of government contractors like Choicepoint. If DHS really wanted to prove to people that they had their acts together, the no fly list would be a good start. That list alone shows they can't even get it right with what they have now. And they want MORE information? That's just asking for a disaster.

There is a such thing as too much information. And if you've ever done intelligence work (and I'm guessing you haven't), you'd know that most of it is useless and it's only a small portion that is actually useful. Yet it all must be gone thru. The government barely has enough resources (and in a lot of cases, I'd argue not enough) to do the job it's tasked to do. Adding 300 million people to it will overwhelm the system and then things REALLY won't get done.

Adding 300 million people to a database and all that information is just asking for trouble. Most of it will never be sorted thru, be littered with errors and inconsistencies. And we still won't be safer.

It's nice that you have faith in your government. Having been on the inside, I don't.

Super