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<H1 id=storyTitle>Although airport security tells passengers they must show ID to board planes, they really dont
</H1>By SCOTT CANON and MIKE RICE
The Kansas City Star
Flying across the country? Leave your pocketknife in the car. Don’t carry more than a few ounces of liquids onto the plane. And don’t forget that ID.
Wait? ID? Turns out we don’t need no stinking ID.
Sure enough, leaving it behind will buy you hassle. It will probably annoy those in line behind you as the bottleneck of security slows from crawl to standstill. And it means you’re in for a thorough frisking and a greater likelihood that the possessions you’ve dragged along on your journey will be tested for traces of explosives.
But the Transportation Security Administration concedes you still should be able to board that plane.
Consider the travels of Phillip Mocek, a Seattle software developer who grew up in Blue Springs. A few years ago, he read about a court case challenging various U.S. travel rules and decided he didn’t like the idea of having to prove his identity to board a jet.
“I object to what I see as the federal government making a requirement for me to travel around my own country,” Mocek said. “So I started testing the system.”
Two or three years ago — he can’t recall exactly when he started — Mocek headed out on trips with his driver’s license planted firmly out of view. (“I still carried it with me. My need to get places, if necessary, would have overridden my desire to flex my rights.”)
And time and again, he got where he wanted to go. He’d arrive at an airport with his boarding pass already printed and head to the security check.
“I would say, ‘I don’t have any ID to show you.’ I very clearly did not want to lie, but I did not want to anger somebody by saying, ‘I don’t want to show you my ID,’ ” Mocek said, conceding he was parsing words.
Each time he would be subject to extra clearance — “I understand that’s the way it is now” — but he always got cleared to fly.
After a visit last month to see family, he went to Kansas City International Airport to catch his flight back to Seattle.
To his thinking, the questions from the private security detail at the facilities’ far-flung gates seemed more intrusive than he’d experienced elsewhere. He thought that being sent back to the airline counter for another boarding pass was unnecessary. But in the end, with the usual extra frisking, he flew without pulling out his ID.
Still, he was particularly annoyed at signs at KCI declaring that a government ID was required to fly. So when he returned home, he logged onto the TSA Web site and posted a complaint.
Eventually, a TSA official wrote back.
“TSA requires travelers to produce a valid form of government-issued ID to verify that the name on the travel document matches the ID,” the response said.
But then it went on in seeming contradiction: “If a traveler is unwilling or unable to produce a valid form of ID, the traveler is required to undergo additional screening at the checkpoint to gain access to the secured area of the airport.”
So an ID is required, except that it’s not.
“If you have an ID,” TSA spokeswoman Andrea McCauley said in an interview, “we highly encourage that you use that ID, because it speeds up the process not only for you but for anybody behind you in line.”
But allowances are made for the ID-free, she said, “because we have to put something in place for people who are on a trip and lose their ID.”
That said, the agency’s specific policy remains officially secret.
Even without an ID, McCauley said, such passengers should not pose an extra security threat. Their names are still cross-checked against the federal no-fly list of potential terrorists. Their baggage, like every other passenger’s, is electronically screened, and the travelers are searched more thoroughly than most people with identification.
The ID-free baggage check — determined by TSA rules — is possible. It takes longer, and luggage tags will be marked “No ID.” But airlines move the process along.
The process just hasn’t always been consistent. When John Gilmore, the millionaire founder of Sun Microsystems, tried to board a flight in 2002 without ID, he was denied. He sued the government, asking for the details of its boarding policy. He ultimately failed.
But responses like the one sent by TSA to Mocek expose bits of it at a time.
“There should be accurate notice from the government about rules that apply to citizens, and the notice that you need ID doesn’t seem accurate,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and the chief counselor for privacy during the Clinton administration.
KCI spokesman Joe McBride said the ID requirement was a federal mandate that superseded the airport’s authority. But he acknowledged that sometimes there might be extenuating circumstances requiring screeners to be flexible.
KCI is one of only a handful of U.S. airports whose screeners are employed by a private company. Most airport screeners are employed by the TSA. The screeners at KCI work for a company called First Line but still operate under national guidelines.
KCI has had a private screening work force since 2002 and sought that designation because of its unusual terminal layout, which requires more than a dozen checkpoints. Screeners at the airport declined to comment for this article.
Regular announcements and signs posted at the airport insist travelers need ID. Inside Terminal A on a recent day, no one appeared resistant. Screeners spent a few seconds examining each ID — first looking to make sure the face on the ID matched that of the person in front of them and then scanning the ID with a special flashlight to ensure validity.
Two area travelers, Katherine Neet and Nelly Fritz, politely gave their IDs to a screener before going through the metal detector. For them and others, flashing a photo ID and boarding pass to an airport screener in the post-Sept. 11 world seemed both routine and necessary.
“I would rather show my ID than have them touch me all over my body,” said Neet.
Fritz agreed.
“It makes it safer for us to travel,” she said.
Other travelers said they have never witnessed anyone refusing to show ID to a screener.
Traveling through Kansas City on business, Jerry Combs of Kentucky said, “I can’t believe anybody would refuse to show their ID.”
http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/567590.html
Interesting article, but if this catches on, the lines just might get longer. I don't see it happening, but still...
They're why Catherine Stevens, wife of Senator Ted Stevens, has trouble boarding a flight almost every time with her real, honest government-issued photo ID because she has the same name as the that singer dude Cat Stevens.