Reason Magazine has a little follow up on John Gilmore’s quest to travel in the US without being required to show documentation. The upshot? It failed. What’s worse, the surveillance capabilities of the state, with sensors everywhere scanning RFID-enabled ID or other artifacts and sending the data into mine-able databases, are only poised to grow:
In June 2008, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officially announced that travelers who refuse to show ID, à la Gilmore, will be barred from airplanes. (Previously, the consequences seemed to depend on the airport and the TSA agent.)
But it might be that our science-fiction surveillance vision was merely a bit premature. Jim Harper, a technology and privacy scholar with the Cato Institute, says the techniques and practices for a universally tracked and databased America “are still out there waiting for their chance and could be just five years away.”
