People were flying without any photo ID until just a few years ago (except internationally). We’ve given up so much freedom & so much of what made air travel fun in exchange for so little.
We need to stop letting people scare us into giving away our freedoms.
Arguably it's merely been taken from us. There are plenty of who object, and the TSA is wildly unpopular. That makes little difference to the fact that the pace continues ever further. I don't mean to be defeatist, but I don't think a sternly worded letter has ever made much of a difference, and probably won't in the future.
The only caveat is that when REAL ID takes effect and entire states full of people (e.g. Arizona) simply cannot fly, maybe enough complaints will be generated to come to some compromise. I'm not holding my breath, though.
Citation?
https://www.dhs.gov/real-id shows Arizona in green.
I do the latter and will just continue to do so. shrug
That said, the experiment hasn't really been done. Can a politician campaign on restoring the dignity of the American public? Can a politician convince people that security theater is real and really harmful? I would guess not, but I would be glad to support whoever that is.
It doesn't seem all that scary if everyone's doing it. Just look at the use of facial recognition in the movie Coco. They could have made up any magic to stop Hector from leaving, but Disney decided to teach kids that having your faced scanned when going through security is totally normal.
Planes were hijacked all the time, and back then they weren't nearly as many planes as now. [0]
> so much of what made air travel fun
It's not supposed to be "fun", flying isn't a right, it's a privilege that enabled mass tourism which is an ecological and cultural plague. People take easyjet/ryanair like they take their cars to go grocery shopping, Berlin, Paris, Rome, &c. are now hell on earth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings
Free movement is a right in the EU BTW
Deezer/Jump/OFO/Mobike/DonkeyRepublic bikes everywhere, now they even started using electric scooters, parking them in front of monuments, in the middle of the already small sidewalks, on the road (??!)
You can't go to museum/parks/monuments/local biergarten.
Public transports can't keep up. Even worst, roads can't keep up (uber + car2go + taxis everywhere)
Half of the flats in touristic areas are aribnbs, artificially increasing local prices + kicking local people out.
Artificially increases restaurants / bars prices.
I don't even get how tourists are having fun, it's literally like queuing in Disneyland to see/do the most basic things and take the same pictures as everyone else. I saw hundreds of people queueing for 2+ hours for a famous burger / kebab place, if that's what you consider "fun" and "freedom" ...
> how come you think free movement is a privilege
Never said that. Now that people can buy a Paris<>Berlin tickets for the price of a restaurant they go enjoy their mindless 3 days of paradise, wreak havoc on the locals, and move to their next destination. It's just like freedom of speech, when abused it starts to get nasty.
> When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society. - Guy Debord
> Ideology, information and > culture < tend more and more to lose their content and become pure quantity. - Raoul Vaneigem
> you would like to have active and passive citizens ?
No, just informed and non destructive tourism. The number of tourists coming to berlin, for example, doubled in 10 years, the infrastructure almost didn't change in the same time. 3.5 million inhabitants, 14[0] millions annual tourists. Every single month of the year: 40%+ of the population is made of tourists.
[0] edit: 13.5 million guests, 32.9 million overnight stays. https://about.visitberlin.de/en/materialien/toolkit/tourism-...
Instead of shaking your fist at airplanes flying overhead, maybe try increasing the hotel tax and cracking down on AirBnBs.
Of course, you'll probably encounter opposition to this because some locals are making a great deal of profit.
Going to go out on a limb and say that preferring to be biometrically screened at an airport than incarcerated or dead isn't an irrational phobia of the latter either...
I don't disagree that our freedoms are being eroded but what exactly was more fun about air travel 5 years ago that isn't still today?
You can still do this:
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification
I had to do it once and just barely got through. They had to phone in and then ask me several questions that were rather ambiguous. Sort of like credit check questions but with some other strange stuff mixed in. The only specific question I remember was they asked me to name any churches or schools nearby my home address.
Then I had to get a very invasive patdown and they had to take every item out of my bag and check them all individually.
(You are required to carry ID when visiting another Schengen country, but it is not checked by airports like for extra-Schengen flights)
Scaring the public is worth billions of dollars to businesses selling this crap to the government. It won't end as long as it basically prints money.
That's why we added the metal detectors. Reinforcing the cockpit doors may have been an okay response to the events of 9/11 and potentially would have been sufficient to prevent most major terrorist attacks that seek to use the plane itself as a weapon rather than merely destroying it. (Also people will generally gang up to attack hijackers now rather than just remaining calm and letting them fly the plane elsewhere. Which sufficiently changes the dynamic.)
Sidenote: entering/exiting both Aus and NZ recently, immigration checkpoints in both countries did appear to make extensive use of facial recognition.
Given the somewhat-recent studies[1] which show that the vast majority of border guards (unless they happen to be "super-matchers") have a 1/7-or-worse failure rate when trying to check a person's passport photo, I think it's quite understandable to do the facial recognition electronically.
But such a system should only be used for immigration purposes (where identity verification is very important to get right), not for getting onto a plane or just coming into the waiting areas of domestic airports.
I'm actually quite happy with the facial recognition cameras at the Australian border - they make things a lot faster than they used to be from my experience.
It's not 100% ID-free though: AFAIK they are permitted to check ID, and they do it randomly.
Can I ask what countries you fly in? I fly frequently within the European Union and I am a EU citizen. However, even for flights between the Netherlands and Germany I have to enter my ID details during check-in and it's checked multiple times throughout the trip.
It's not just random checks, but it seems mandatory. When you drop off the luggage they ask for your ticket + ID. When you board the plane, they again ask for your boarding pass + ID. The exception is large, modern airports such as Munich where you simply scan your boarding pass when boarding the plane.
How do you do this? Do you just refuse?
I have definitely also flown from Germany to Italy and back without ever showing ID. I can also recall flying from Germany to Shiphol without ID, but I can't recall whether I was controlled on the return flight.
I remember the first time I encountered a metal detector at an airport (my parents were concerned that it would terrorize us kids but I just thought it was interesting). Before then we just walked onto the plane, like boarding a train.
And how well did that end up?
Remember "back in the good old days" when 30+ highjackings a year was normal?
> And how well did that end up?
With no more serious problems than have been seen under the new regime over a much longer period than the new regime has been in place.
> Remember "back in the good old days" when 30+ highjackings a year was normal?
Well, no, not literally, because I'm under 50. But I do remember the much lighter than the current regime security checks that were put into place which ended that, and reduced the base rate of security incidents so low that it's nearly impossible to detect whether the much more intrusive current measures have any added effect.