Sep 24, 2004 4 min read

When dealing with an exasperating, bull-headed teenager, my father often resorted to a standby parental admonishment: Are you saying that everyone else in the world is wrong and you are right? If so, prove it. His point being, of course, that if you are the lone voice, chances are you are way off key. But if you had credible evidence, go ahead and convince him.

I thought about this while reading about John Gilmore.

A tenacious teen convinced that wisdom belongs solely to those of a tender age will rail against the establishment. Adults won’t.

We will willingly whip out photo IDs and scoot out of our shoes just because we are told that we must in order to travel by air. Thank goodness there remain grownups like Gilmore who will still challenge “authority.”

Gilmore is a Libertarian by choice and a millionaire by trade, as one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. So he has the clout to challenge the government. He has filed suit against Attorney General John Ashcroft. We wouldn’t have known about this – the U.S. Justice Department wants to keep the whole case under seal – except for an appeals court judge who has opened the window for a glimpse at the case. We need to pay attention before Justice is successful in shutting it again.

Here’s what has happened so far, according to the Associated Press report. Gilmore, in 2002, was barred by Southwest Airlines employees from boarding a flight out of Oakland International Airport to Baltimore because he refused to show a government-issued photo identification.

He asked the airline what allowed them to deny him access to move freely about the country by demanding he show his paperwork. The airline said that’s the law, but if he didn’t like that provision he could let them pat him down and rummage through his luggage.

What right did they have to do that?

That’s the law, the airline said.

So Gilmore tried the same thing with United Airlines at San Francisco International Airport. Again he was told that federal directives required him to cooperate or he couldn’t travel.

So Gilmore told them to show him the law.

They couldn’t. It’s a secret.

Then Gilmore tried to get the government to show him the law.

They wouldn’t. It’s a secret.

So Gilmore filed a lawsuit against Ashcroft attempting to gain a copy of the law.

It’s such a secret that Justice had the whole case sealed from the public’s view.

Somewhere along the line a judge dismissed the case, without even determining if such a law exists.

Gilmore appealed.

And that’s when a judge lifted the seal.

But Justice isn’t stopping now. The government’s top attorneys are still trying to put it under wraps.

In a court filing they wrote, “In order to protect air travel security, a federal statute and accompanying regulations prohibit defendants from disclosing any such directive in open court, to plaintiff or plaintiff’s counsel.”

That’s the kind of oppressive secrecy one would expect from Vladimir Putin, who can strip the power of every official in Russia’s “democracy.” This isn’t what we expect or should tolerate from our government.

We have all blindly accepted that security would be heightened at airports post-Sept. 11. In fact we demand that it must be. But we also expect that if we requested that our government enact a law to provide for the common defense that it would, upon request, provide us with copies of the law.

We might not subscribe to Gilmore’s political views, and we might be more willing than he to acknowledge that some requests to identify ourselves are necessary, but we cannot allow our government to operate in secrecy and go unchallenged.

Gilmore’s case is huge in spotlighting the Kafka-like tactics of our own government that can accuse someone of violating a law when it won’t even acknowledge if the law exists. It’s incredibly bizarre.

For now Gilmore appears to be the solo voice singing out of tune with the rest of America. Thank goodness for that. Here’s to hoping others join his choir.

Luanne Traud is the Herald-Standard’s editorial page editor. E-mail: ltraud@heraldstandard.com.