At 09:34 AM 12/20/96 -0800, Tim wrote:

...

Umm.. tried to get on a flight without having ID lately? Doesn't work - against policy. Anti-terrorism policy and all.. it's for your own safety, of course. At the risk of undercutting Bill's facetiousness, this was of course

At 1:22 AM -0800 12/20/96, Vangelis wrote: precisely his point.

Yeah. I've spent most of this year going around North America on airplanes a couple of times a month. Sometimes they insist on government ID, claiming (falsely) that it's a government regulation. Other times they insist on photo ID (probably correctly) claiming it's a government regulation (usually I fly electronic-ticket, which they ask for photo-ID for, and I don't mind that.) United is almost always satisfied with my employee-ID and the credit card I used to buy the ticket with, except that they don't bother telling curbside baggage-handlers that. And that's not even counting the "You must turn on your laptop" crap. And it's PRO-terrorism policy "Be afraid! Be very afraid!" It's just not something a civilized place would do. (Of course now that Ted "Accused Unabomber" Kaczynski is in jail, the Olympics are over and it's pretty obvious that TWA 800 exploded due to bad design//////////natural causes, they really _ought_ to either give our civil rights back or else find some other excuse for it, like "heavy Christmas traffic is an attractive target". But instead they've got announcements about "suspicious packages should be reported to security checkpoints immediately" and "cars parked in the Red Zone will be towed away and detonated".) At least they weren't doing most of this paranoia when I visited my sister earlier this summer, bringing a couple pounds of Silly Putty in my luggage as presents for her kids, packed near the alarm clock.... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)