Justice Wants Airline ID Case Kept Secret

[Snazzy]

Justice Wants Airline ID Case Kept Secret

Sun Sep 5,11:43 PM ET

By MAY WONG, Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO - The U.S. Department of Justice (news - web sites) has asked an appellate court to keep its arguments secret for a case in which privacy advocate John Gilmore is challenging federal requirements to show identification before boarding an airplane.


A federal statute and other regulations "prohibit the disclosure of sensitive security information, and that is precisely what is alleged to be at issue here," the government said in court papers filed Friday with the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Disclosing the restricted information "would be detrimental to the security of transportation," the government wrote.

Attorneys for Gilmore, a 49-year-old San Francisco resident who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, said they don't buy the government's argument and that its latest request raises only more questions.

"We're dealing with the government's review of a secret law that now they want a secret judicial review for," one of Gilmore's attorneys, James Harrison, said in a phone interview Sunday. "This administration's use of a secret law is more dangerous to the security of the nation than any external threat."

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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040906/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/airline_id_4

[punpirate]

1. When the government wants secret proceedings because...

... they don't even want a law on secrecy to be explained, we've gone way beyond going down the rabbit hole.

I suspect that the root complaint here is the standards for the no-fly list, whether specified or not. Ashcroft doesn't want it known that the lists have been used increasingly for partisan political purposes. This is not about someone buying a ticket under the name "Bugs Bunny" and expecting a boarding pass.