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How I Got Through Airport Security with No I.D.
That person turned out to be Peter Pietra, the director of privacy policy and compliance at TSA. This was Pietra’s exact reply: “[Y]ou are not allowed to fly unless you can present acceptable I.D. to match up with your boarding pass. Because we know this can be a problem for people who've lost/forgotten I.D. or may not have acceptable I.D., we developed a process to help passengers who want help by using a variety of ways to try to verify that the person standing at the checkpoint without I.D. is actually the person on the boarding pass. While this typically involves asking questions from commercial databases like Lexis-Nexis or Choicepoint, sometimes they will try to look the address up on Google Earth and see if there are questions they can ask that someone at that address should be able to know. (What is a cross street, is there a park across the street, etc.) To get the house color I assume the house must have a photo on Google Earth or some similar website.”
The idea that an airport official can tell me the color of my house as a favor to me when I lose my wallet is a bit disconcerting. I was really happy to get on that plane that day. But I wasn’t thrilled to learn that instant access to satellite images is a government tool of airport identification. It feels invasive. And does knowing the color of my house really prove that I am me, anyway?
I could almost accept government use of invasive-feeling technologies if such technology were used consistently, by all levels of government, without infringing on civil liberties. But although the government sometimes makes scarily efficient use of technology, it sometimes does the opposite by failing to make use of technology, with terrible consequences for personal freedom.
Here is a case in point. Last month, my nephew’s house was robbed. (He lives in Atlanta and I think his house is yellow.) The thief stole electronic toys, computers, and televisions. My frantic nephew called the police to report the crime. When they arrived, they asked my nephew his name, and of course he told them. They placed him under arrest.
The police claimed my nephew was wanted in Tennessee for drug offenses. My nephew has a fairly common name, and when they heard it, the police arrested him and dragged him to jail, leaving his wife and four children behind in a state of shocked disbelief.
One would have thought that big-city police would have electronic access to arrest records, photographs, fingerprints, and other information. They should be able to clear up a case of mistaken identity speedily. But my nephew sat in the Fulton County jail for two days. It took two whole days for a judge to order him set free.
Get the irony? It took two minutes for TSA to determine to its satisfaction that I was the lady who lived in the green house in Pennsylvania. But it took two days for a big-city police department to determine that a man, a crime victim, found inside his own family home was in fact who he said he was, and not some guy with a similar name from Ohio wanted for selling dope in Tennessee
Proof again that technology is only as good as the people who use it—or refuse to use it.
Anita L. Allen is the Henry R. Silverman professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes about everyday ethics, health, and the right to privacy for scholarly journals and the popular press.
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Anita L. Allen is the Henry R. Silverman professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes about everyday ethics, health, and the right to privacy for scholarly journals and the popular press.
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Anita L. Allen is the Henry R. Silverman professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes about everyday ethics, health, and the right to privacy for scholarly journals and the popular press.
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Anita L. Allen is the Henry R. Silverman professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes about everyday ethics, health, and the right to privacy for scholarly journals and the popular press.
Will the real government please stand up! How in the world can someone from the TSA, an agency with the IQ of a slug, make use of Google Earth, and the Atlanta Police Department, get things so wrong?
It must be in the water, things like this don't happen. There has to be some form of shadow government that is using all the technology that is available, and the government that can be seen, using 19th Century tools and grinders.
For my part, hopefully there will be a nice Voice on the end of the line, if not, then my day will surely be ruined.
Wow! Great article. You and Bruce Schneier should be the Batman and Robin of the DHS; perhaps we would have less security theater, more respect for civil rights, and more real bad guys caught. You are one of the best!
Great story, but really!?! Based on a recent trip to JFK sans wallet, all I had to do was submit to a secondary screening and I was through (I had my ID sent to me for the return trip). I was surprised the TSA was as easy on me as they were, sure they would never let me on the plane, but after a rigorous search it was no problem, and this at the primary NYC airport, where security concerns are paramount.
Follow up:
Thanks for your comment on my article. The system is seemingly arbitary.EastCoastBias got through with just a secondary screening. I got through after naming the color of my house and then going through a secondary physical screening. For the San Francisco Philly leg of my ID-less trip a few days later, I produced a faxed copy of my passport and a temporary American Express card, then after secondary screening, I was let through. For some reason my shoe swipe for suspicious substances tested "positive" and a supervisor had to be called about that. I would like to stress that all of the TSA people were very pleasant. Its just that the policies under which they operate could use some reassessment. And by the way, the screening process without ID in LAX took so long that I missed my plane. To make sure that didn't happen at SFO, I went to the airport 3 hours early. Cheers!
Anita - Couldn't agree more that TSA standards are arbitrary, person to person, airport to airport. They do try, and like any airport job they have to be patient to survive the wrath of even average customers. With so much on the line, it's disconcerting that there isn't more of a standard approach.
I can do this from my iPod. This is no big deal, everybody has access to these satellite images now, not just TSA.
I think you can pretty much guarantee that now people with no id will be put through the wringer. They were trying to help you out in a way that had obviously worked well in the past, but by publishing it to score some journalistic points, you've managed to screw everyone that will ever follow in your footsteps. I hate to be this way, but would you have claimed some sort of discrimination if they hadn't let you go through? That would have been a great story too!
I really don't get your point.
They had the decency to let you through - now you complain about it? You gave them your address and personal details (which they were entitled to have) then feel invaded when they look up commonly available data about where you like!
They were more than helpful. You now moan about it!
Some people are never happy!
We can all, even the government, l get to Google satellitte images via our iphones and laplops as girlinsalem points out. But should TSA rely on such images to ID passengers?
I suppose it ultimately depends on who you deal with at the airport.
My Story:
This was in 1996, pre 9/11, but still.....at Salt Lake City airport, I was waved through every security check point, x-ray, etc simply because, being a young "punk rocker" with a penchant for thrift store jackets, I happened to be wearing that day a blue work jacket with reflective strips and a few patches that said things like "chief ground service."
I was never asked for any ID; I was treated like one of them.
In other words, I could've been arrested for impersonating an airport employee.
I just liked the jacket; it could've said, "I heart Johnny Rotten," for all I cared!
I'm sorry but the only thing that immediately comes to mind is that color-blindness is a sex linked genetic condition. There would be all these men (and dogs for that matter) who really could not tell you the color of their home. And blind people better not travel with a couple of forms of ID.
I'm sorry, but didn't you just compromise security standards for airlines throughout the nation by publishing this? Either anyone will be able to sneak onto a plane after a quick google maps search, or they will stop information based exceptions and people who are caught without an ID like yourself will have to take the train. I don't think getting an article published on a website is more important than national security.
Ms. Allen,
No doubt that for every great outcome there is an equal horror story. But what's truly illuminated by your article is the dire need for consistant training, or retraining across the board of all those individual gate keepers and their agencies. As we wander into this century with creeps, terrorists, serial killers, and criminals, et al. lurking about, greater access to our personal information could quite certainly be handled appropriately: without jepordizing our bill of rights.
Apparently Southwest, American, and United will all let you on
the airplane with absolutely no ID. You can even get through the TSA
security with no ID although it is a bit more involved and slower.
US Airways, however, will not even let you on their plane without
ID. This caused my wife serious trouble when she accidentally left her
purse on a US Airways airplane and lost her ID and they stranded her
in Indiana. She had to buy another ticket with American Airlines.
This incident really ruined our vacation and cost us $908.20. I have
written a letter detailing the whole fiasco and begun a website:
http://usairsucks.org
Thank you.
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