The REAL-ID Act and the TSA proposal to require ID to fly

Much of my work for the last decade as a consultant to the Identity Project (PapersPlease.org) on travel-related civil-liberties and human rights issues has focused on requirements to obtain government permission and/or show government-issued ID credentials in order to travel by common carrier.

No law in the USA requires you to show ID to fly, as I have explained to state legislators and Washington think tanks.

The TSA tells travellers they have to show government-issued ID to fly, harasses those who decline to do so, and sometimes has them arrested by local police on trumped-up (will that word now have new meaning?) charges.

But people with no ID at all fly every day. “We have a procedure for that,” the TSA says whenever its demands for ID are challenged in court.

Now the TSA has proposed — in a backhanded way calculated to evade public or Congressional debate or judicial oversight — to impose a new official requirement for all airline passengers either to show government-issued ID or to certify that they live in a state that the DHS deems sufficiently compliant with the REAL-ID Act 2005. This ID requirement would be an additional prerequisite before the TSA will give them “permission” to pass though its checkpoints or board airline flights.

For more on what’s wrong with this proposal, see the comments filed this week with the TSA by the Identity Project and this post from the Identity Project blog.