It just keeps on getting better

About a week ago I told you about the case of John Gilmore, who is challenging requirements to produce ID in order to fly on the grounds that there is no law requiring people to carry indentification and the ID requirement violates various constitutional protections.

The government "responded" in federal district court by not only refusing to produce the text of the law requiring airline passengers to show identification, it refused even to acknowledge whether or not the requirement exists! The court, astonishingly, accepted the feds' argument that it had no jurisdiction to review the law without even knowing what it says or even if it exists, and dismissed the case. Gilmore, of course, appealed, and now inanity has turned into utter farce. From the Sacramento (CA) Bee for September 5:

The U.S. Department of Justice has asked an appellate court to keep its arguments secret for a case in which privacy advocate John Gilmore challenges federal requirements to show identification before boarding commercial flights.

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. ...

The government contends its court arguments should be sealed from public view and heard before a judge outside the presence of Gilmore and his attorneys as well.

It would be so laughably ridiculous is the issue at stake was not so serious. What the government is arguing is that it is "detrimental to security," that it involves "disclosure of sensitive security information," for it to reveal the basis of its authority to require ID - that is, the basis of its authority to act. It is a threat to our security, our "transportation security," our national security, our ability to be "safe," for the government to show that it actually has the legal authority it's claiming to have. It's the Bill O'Reilly school of constitutional jurisprudence: "Shut up!"

Attorneys for Gilmore, a 49-year-old San Francisco resident who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 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."

Damn f'ing straight.