An interesting lawsuit
has been filed by Civil libertarian John Gilmore today challenging as unconstitutional a secret federal rule that requires domestic US travelers to identify themselves.
"This will use your ID to search in a stew of databases like credit records, previous travel history, criminal records, motor vehicle records, banks, web searches, and companies that collect personal information from consumer transactions. Your life history will be gathered and scanned, using secret criteria, whenever you book a flight or arrive at an airport. If the machine decides you're a risk, the airline will not let you fly, and federal cops will show up to interrogate you. They will probably tell you that you were 'randomly' selected for all this attention, but they will be lying."
Gilmore's credentials are impressive: 5th employee at Sun, co-founder (with John Perry Barlow) of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and creator of the "alt.*" newsgroups.
Will be interesting to see how this turns out. The information systems that the US government is putting together sound truly scary because of the massive scale of privacy violation that could occur.
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