EFF co-founder John Gilmore is filing a lawsuit attempting to overturn regulations requiring people to show their identification at airports. Gilmore says such requirements are unconstitutional.
It is difficult to imagine any scenario in which a court does not simply point to Sept. 11 and rule that requiring identification or air travelers is well within the government’s powers to ensure public health and safety.
In fact, I suspect the judge or judges who ruled in favor of Gilmore’s contention would likely face impeachment hearings in the Senate.
Finally, I don’t think Gilmore will find much support for his argument that allowing terrorist acts to occur might be economically efficient,
In 2000, scheduled air carriers carried almost 632 million passengers. (http://www.bts.gov/publications/airactstats2000/tables/AirportTable1.htm) If the same number of passengers fly in 2002, but instead of arriving at the airport 30 minutes before their flights, they arrive 2 hours before their flights, those passengers will have collectively spent more than 100,000 years sitting uselessly in airports or standing in line to be searched.
Contrast this to the lost lives of the people who died in the 9/11 attacks. If each of the approximately 3,300 people who died lost 35 years that they would have otherwise lived, then in total they lost about the same amount of time. Government-imposed searches waste as much life *every year* as the lifetimes that the attack wasted.
Inconveniencing hundreds of millions of innocents, trying to catch dozens, or save thousands, RAISES the costs to society, rather than lowering them. Another way to think about it is that if we did away with the increased “security” and went back to letting people catch planes on 30 minutes’ notice, we would gain back as much time every year as was taken from our citizens in the 9/11 attacks.
This is a foolish argument. It makes no sense at all to compare years spent waiting in line with years spent dead.
Such a cost benefit analysis makes sense if we’re comparing the same unit. For example, a regulation to require infants to have their own seat on an airplane might save the lives of a few infants who are belted in properly when an airplane crashes, but it might cause even more infants to die in automobile accidents when their parents decided not to fly because it’s too expensive to buy another seat for the infant. And it might be useful to compare the benefits of different regulations that impact waiting times at airports.
But it makes no sense at all to compare hours spent waiting to hours spent being dead. Almost everybody — except Gilmore apparently — would prefer to spend two hours waiting in line than spend two hours being dead.
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