Shouting “Fire” in a Crowded Airplane

The best commentary I’ve seen on the John Gilmore airline delaying stunt was left in tin-foil hat wearer Larry Lessig’s comments by Seth Finkelstein:

I’ve finally figured out what bothers me so much about this.

In effect, Gilmore was doing a millionaire’s version of trolling.

Exactly. To the idle rich Gilmore, airline security is a big, fat, joke, but to the people who fly airplanes every day, it’s a reality that they confront every day of their working lives.

Millionaires who delay flights carrying hundreds of people in order to get attention are enough to make me return to the Bolshevik values of my youth and advocate eating the rich, or at least taxing them into poverty. This stunt — reminiscent of a Woody Harrelson protest that shut down the Golden Gate Bridge for several hours, preventing ambulances from reaching hospitals and fathers from being present for the birth of their babies — is on the wrong issue in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Stunt-master John Gilmore was a co-founder of the EFF, a civil liberties organization that’s never done anything of value for any of the sufferers of the major civil liberties threats of the last decade, which should come as no surprise.

UPDATE: Prompted by the Gilmore stunt, Reason magazine rushes an article on civil liberties by Brian Doherty onto their web site (note: this is a correction), which attempts to explain why the government wants a picture ID from all airline passengers:

As you check in, your biometrically encoded national ID (a perennial legislative favorite, though not in active play at the moment) is scanned and your identity is checked against every available database the government can access, public and private. This will likely include, among many others:

…

? the “deadbeat dad” database (a poster child for the inevitable mission creep of all government databases, it has already expanded in just a few years to be used to track down student loan deadbeats and unemployment cheats);

The “deadbeat dad” database Doherty mentions is the “National Newhire Registry”, to which all employers are required to report all newhires, whether they’re child support debtors or not, so cross-referencing this database to airline passengers would be a meaningless exercise. The government wants to know if people on the “do not fly” terrorist watch list are boarding planes, and to do this they need to know who’s flying.

Civil libertarians who like to complain about the maltreatment of terrorists and the idle rich have been silent about the government’s systematic, monthly scans of all bank records and utility accounts for those with names similar to those of known child support debtors. Why is that?

ANOTHER UPDATE: There is also a federal law to the effect that child support debtors lose their passports when they get $5000 behind, which the INS enforces, so once again, Doherty’s “mission creep” argument goes nowhere.