War on Terror and the Constitution

From Findlaw.com: Federal Appeals Court Upholds Airport IDs

By DAVID KRAVETS Associated Press Writer

(AP) - SAN FRANCISCO-An appeals court on Thursday dismissed a legal challenge to federal airport regulations requiring passengers to show identification before they board planes.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected claims by Libertarian activist and millionaire John Gilmore that the policy constituted an illegal search and violated his right to travel freely.

After reviewing the government's identification policy in private, a unanimous three-judge panel said the policy was not overly intrusive

Interestingly, the case involved not only matters of search, but also of government transparency:

The court said Gilmore could leave the airport if he didn't want to show his ID and had other ways to get around besides air travel. It also rejected assertions that the act of showing identification was an illegal search of Gilmore, who made his millions as a founding employee of Sun Microsystems.

Gilmore....said government regulations should be disclosed in writing to the public. While millions of passengers willingly show their IDs at airports, Simpich said there is no way to know whether the regulations call for impermissible searches because the government, and the court, won't make them public.

The last word on transparency in this case:

the review was done in private for security reasons.

This is the kind of issue one might consider in thinking about the second paper topic, how has the War on Terror affected constitutionalism?