March 15, 2005 | John Gilmore: A User's Manual

Cryptome.org has posted an email from Brad Barnhill describing how to get avoid having to show identification at the airport.

As many of you know, John Gilmore is currently suing the government to reveal whether the identification requirement exists and to actually make the law public. (See here and here).

Barnhill's method basically involves getting your boarding pass printed ahead of time using the Internet, bypassing the airline altogether by not checking any bags and then pressing TSA employees to show you the rule. They will likely harass you for acting differently and then just send you to (yup, you guessed it) secondary screening, where they will swab all your stuff for explosives, pat down your chest and make you undo your pants.

Barnhill claims to have all the FAA rules regarding identification rules. I think he is mistaken here in thinking he has all of them. There likely exists a security directive, which is classified, that sets the policy for airlines and TSA employees regarding identification. It's just that they won't show it to you.

Of course, this won't work if your name matches or approximates a name on the selectee or no fly list, since you wouldn't be able to print your boarding pass ahead of time.

If you are on the selectee list (meaning you can fly but you have your boarding pass marked SSSS to tell TSA personnel to screen you closer), you'd need to try the method Slate publicized a few months ago (though others talked about the vulnerability before then and the TSA knew about it, according to Adam Shostack) to get past the gates without triggering secondary screening.

If you are on the no fly list, you'd have to have someone else buy your ticket and then use the Slate method.

So far as I can tell, the Barnhill method isn't a security risk. Anyone using it is going to have their person and their possessions scrutinized.

Oh, and though many, many others pointed to the story already -- go read the Gilmore profile by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Dennis Roddy. It's a small masterpiece.

And when you are doing that check out this column he wrote on Saturday that asks questions about the kind of world we live in where companies named after birds of prey are hired by schools to make sure every visitor isn't a sex offender.

Oh, hell, make it a Roddy fest. This one is worth thinking deeply about, too.

Posted by Ryan Singel at March 15, 2005 09:44 AM

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