Frequent Flyer Meets Civil Libertarian

The moments when your politics and real life clash are always anxious and unpleasant ones. For me they normally involve morphing uncontrollably into my father, an unabashed Daley (the orignal not current one) Big-Government Democrat from Chicago. You hope that none of your liberal and/or conservative friends notice the slip and you search vainly through your mind for some intellectual escape hatch from your sin.

One of the most problematic areas for me has been the TSA and privacy fights over airline passenger information. Part of me, the libertarian part, the good part, has read about the amazingly poor record of the TSA both in protecting the rights of citizens and, more importantly, actually improving security. The libertarian part of me is also thrilled the TSA's latest attempt to look into people's lives CAPPS II was defeated by organizations like the EFF, who are doing great work on everyone's behalf. As was the case with Supreme Court's recent decisions against the government's detaining enemy combatants, the death of CAPPS II yesterday deserves to be enjoyed by civil libertarians.

Then there's the part of me that flies about 80,000 miles a year for my job. That part of me wonders a lot about whether or not flying is really about civil liberties. Clearly, I shouldn't have to tell a government agency, that took over security by force from the airlines, details of my personal life to get on an airplane. I also shouldn't have to take abuse from their officials at checkpoints. But, the flying part of me does not want to get on an airplane that's unnecessarily unsafe.

Now that's not to say that CAPPS II would have made flying safer - on the whole it might have, but the costs of the risks being lower would have been too high. But let's suppose the government weren't involved in"protecting" us in flight. Would private airlines not impose similar security measures to make their planes safe enough to avoid civil liability? In short, if I privately contract with Northwest Airlines, who's to say I wouldn't agree that passengers might have to reveal certain things in order to fly to protect their planes and other passengers?

Are our concerns as advocates of liberty merely that these are intrusions into privacy or that it's the government that's intruding? For me, it's the later, because I assume a privately run system would give me the choice to decide on an airlines that had a privacy policy/safety record ratio I could live with. But does everyone here agree with that?