Where do these ridiculous ideas come from ? If I own a piece of private property, like an airplane (or an entire airline) for instance, I can impose whatever senseless and arbitrary conditions on your use of it as I please. Not really - there are quite clear rules in most societies against discrimination of various sorts when you offer a public service. If you say to passenger xxx "you can't fly with me because I don't like your haircut/face/tattoo" then odds are good that you will get away with it. If you say to passenger xxx "you can't fly on *this* plane because I belive you are a security risk" and you are the captain, then you are guaranteed to get away with it (no matter how undeserved it is) but may get hell from
John Kozubik wrote: head office later. If you say to *every* black passenger (or jew, or muslim) "you can't fly with my airline" or even "your ticket will cost double because I don't like you" then you will get slapped down, and rightly so. Of course, if you have a private plane and invite a few friends to miami with you (or even the entire bar) except for any blacks, jews or muslims that might be wanting to come along, then that's fine - the plane is your private property and the Political Correctness Police can go play someplace else. Its when you are offering a public service that the rules change. All the above said - if a particular captain finds a 1" badge saying "suspected terrorist" sufficiently convincing that he then suspects you are a terrorist, he is in his rights to throw you off his plane. Certainly the cabin steward has no such right though, and is probably some dickless little jobsworth that gets a kick from being able to order passengers about. That a blanket ban on his travel (and further, that of his wife) was imposed, simply for possession of the badge, is clearly wrong and anti-terrorist-fever gone mad. I also don't understand how a "federal crime" can be committed on a english airplane - I thought the legal fiction was that from boarding the plane to disembarking (and sometimes not even then, if you are transferring between flights without ever legally "landing") you were in the sovereign territory of whatever flag the airline is registered under? Oh, and as to the "murder" bit, IIRC the captain of a ship or plane may legally kill you if he believes this is required for the safety of his vessel and passengers as a whole - I would hate to see the paperwork though unless you were actually standing there with a bomb and a gun at the time :)
All fine and good - and I appreciate your efforts at uncovering the secret directives and generally resisting the erosion of liberties, however it bothers me greatly that when the obvious is pointed out - that if the _private airlines_ become unburdened by the ID requirement, they will simply require it themselves - that you consider this unjust as well. If any one airline decides to impose a blanket requirement (all passengers must show ID) then that is fine. If all airlines decide to do so independently (or even as a joint response to a situation) then that is fine, but probably could do with a little scrutiny to make sure it really was their idea. However, false ID is easily enough obtained. If the federal government decides to impose (or even "strongly recommend") such a scheme, and further provides a list of "no fly" people (purely on name, so you can't tell if the joe bloggs you have at your desk is a terrorist threat, someone who wrote a purple-ink letter to the president last year, or some other joe bloggs who is really unlucky in his choice of name) then this is a major erosion of liberties, a deeply frightening development, or both.