Is this sufficient grounds to invoke Godwin? 
I didn’t want to say anything before, but… but… I cried myself to sleep last night because of those cruel words.
Yes, mhendo, you made me cry, big man! I hope… sniff… I hope you can live with yourself.
“The Law” and “The Good” are not interchangeable to me.
But “The Law”, RIGHT NOW, as it pertains to privacy rights, is “The Acceptable” to me.
You may not generalize from that to a general belief that the only thing required to make “Good” is pass a proposition into law. Right now, this particular state of law, is just fine with me.
Unfortunately, between “The Acceptable” and “The Apathetic”, I fear we are fucked.
Comparing being asked for ID before entering a federal building to what happened in Nazi Germany is a ridiculous stretch.
Being asked for ID for a justifiable cause is fine by me. What if a bank was just robbed, I was walking down the street and loosely fit the description of the robber. Would I be offended if the police wanted to know who I was, as part of their crime investigation? No. That’s what I pay them to do. If I’m not doing anything illegal AND there is a justifyable cause I’m all for it.
In the OP’s case their appears to be an enforceable law in place.
Anyway, I don’t get the paranoia associated with all of this: first they ask you for ID, next they’re kicking down your door at 2:00 A.M. Chyeah, right.
It’s not even close to a stretch. It happened all the time.
Your example about the bank robbery is a justifiable inquiry. Riding the bus to work and being asked for ‘your papers’ is not.
And just because it’s a law doesn’t make it right. Or effective. It’s harrassment, pure and simple. It serves no purpose.
The lemmings of the world will wake up, but it will probably be too late.
Thanks for the clarification.
She wasn’t being asked for her ID because she was riding the bus to work. She was being asked for her ID because she was trying to enter a government facility (while riding the bus to work). The going to work part is irrelevant. Being asked for ID when entering a federal facility is perfectly acceptable.
I’m not a lawyer but let’s see if I understand this anyhow.
In the beginning there was Terry v. Ohio (1968), and police can stop and frisk a suspect w/out warrant if there’s reasonable suspicion that s/he has committed or is about to commit a crime.
Next came Brown v. Texas (1979), and w/out that reasonable suspicion police can’t simply stop people and require them to identify themselves.
INS v. Delgado (1984) says the INS, acting pursuant to a warrant, can ask employees questions about themselves (oddly, a lot of these didn’t seem to add up to an actual identification), but the decision seems to assume that the employees had the right not to answer, and that the questioning was allowed only so long as it took place at the physical location spelled out in the warrant.
Hiibel v. Nevada (2004) says that the subject of a Terry stop (no warrant but reasonable suspicion) can be required to identify him/herself or face prosecution. This does not speak to police power limits imposed by Brown.
Besides these. I don’t see a whole lot of useful case law with respect to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and identifying oneself at the request of authority, but I’m a lousy legal researcher. I couldn’t say whether 41 CFR 102-74.375© passes or not (and by the way, Bricker, are you sure that’s the law? This one: http://www.akd.uscourts.gov/reference/bail/FPS.pdf )? Because that’s confusing as hell. First off, it doesn’t look very old, so it seems at best speculative to say it would have passed constitutional muster with any Supreme Court back to Warren. Second, it requires i.d. and sign-in during non-work hours, which makes it sound like it applies to federal employees, not the general public, an impression which is reinforced by the fact that section (a) of the very same law says the public isn’t allowed there at all during non-working hours. It also gives what’s-her-name an out depending on when her bus pulled through. It also opens up the question of whether riding in a bus in the open on a public street is actually being “admitted to the property” for the purposes of this regulation. I bet actual employees, to whom the law really applies, go indoors to sign in. So I’d feel pretty safe if I had a good lawyer like Bricker arguing that Brown best applied to my circumstances (no warrant, no suspicion, no investigation, public area, etc.).
But if I was feeling really brave, I’d have Bricker explore another amendment – number one. The First Amendment is about the only one that really protects a person’s anonymity strongly enough that most justices of whatever philosophy admit it. In McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1995) the Court upheld the right to anonymous pamphleteering http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-986.ZC1.html and in the more recent Watchtower case http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/case/1498/ the right to anonymity was expanded to non-political canvassing as well. Of course both these cases seem to require that I be actually engaged in some activity more expressive than sitting on a bus or walking down the street. But I bet Bricker could be very persuasive about why authority’s unprompted interest in my identity has an impermissibly chilling effect on my freedom to speak freely, and why I retain my First Amendment freedoms even if I don’t happen to be overtly exercising them at the moment. And suppose I was on my way to a political rally – would I have to confess that fact to a policeman to be excused from his idle scrutiny?
Basically, if the government acts in an authoritarian manner at random, even against non-targets, whatever its purpose, the effect is to create fear that suppresses our ability to exercise all of our rights. If this were to be combined, say, with government spokesmen, referring to speech critical of a particular administration, telling us that Americans need to “watch what they say,” well, I’d be a little scared.
While I’m quite sure I do not agree with totally random ID checks while I’m walking down the street, I can easily understand them when entering any sort of federal, governmental, or other potentially sensitive situation. Hell, why do they need a list to compare it to? Perhaps the need for the check is to make sure some random few people from Montana, who are angry over Jon Stewart making fun of them, didn’t fabricate a few two cent ID’s to get onto that federal facility and blow something up or shoot a few people?
While I have nothing constructive to add to this conversation at the moment, I would like to applaud The King of Soup.
Actually, I do, but I don’t know if it’s useful or not. The NYPD used to perform random pickets, where they would stop all vehicles and pedestrians, and demand ID. This was ruled unconstutional, because they would not allow the pedestrians to walk away.
The recent random searches of pedestrians entering city property (The subway system), as long as they are allowed to walk away, is, to my understanding, probably legal, but untried.
I am unsure as to how preventing citizens from entering a privately owned facility, open to the public, such as a hotel, is legal. It would seem to have a chilling effect on freedom of association, for example. Certainly, if I saw a goodly amount of police officers surrounding a resturant, I would not go in.
For you canadians: Abuses of police power is, perhaps, rare per cop, but not rare per encounter. I can think of few cases where I have been involved with a police officer, in the last few years, where they did not attempt to bully or infringe on my personal rights.
This goes down to waking up to finding my front door on my apartment forced open (It was slightly damaged, and easy to force without breaking it for a period of time), and a cop looking for someone in my living room. (I do not know what he was doing there. I had never heard of the person stated. Apparently, the person was across the street, as I later heard, and he was an actual cop.) He did not have permission from the landlord, or the bank. He did not show a warrant, or identify himself except for ‘I’m a cop’. Nothing was missing. If I had been slightly more awake, I would have gotten his badge number, but I was not thinking too fast. This is not what I consider acceptable.
It’s unacceptable if they do anything with it. They know who she is, and they’re not comparing her ID to a list or making notes or searching her for explosives. And she’s not leaving the bus! They’re harrassing her.
Er…if they DON’T do anything with it.
I also think that if they really wanted to protect people from random terrorists on busses, they would create a loading point for employees to that facility, ID those employees who are actually getting off the bus and going into the building, and route the non-Federal employees around the facility. As someone said earlier, they’re not REQUIRED to do this, but it would go a long way in giving citizens a better feeling about both security and their individual right to privacy.
I personally equate “security guard” with “rent-a-cop” and I like to think I would NEVER yield to a demand for ID from such. I’ve seen far too many security guards who are cop wanna-bes and who really get off on their largely imaginary authority.
A real, live, lawfully designated police officer is another matter.
Did I miss something? I thought these were federal security people. Cops. With guns and rights to end your life if they feel you’re a threat.
Yeah, this is the main point for me.
There seems to be little doubt that the ID checks are legal; i’m not attempting to argue otherwise.
But i just don’t understand the point of checking ID in this situation where there is no consistency in the type of ID required, where the people checking ID give it nothing more than a cursory glance, where they do not make any attempt to compare the carrier of the ID to lists of known suspects, where the ID isn’t compared against some other document the passenger is carrying (as in the case of airline tickets), and where the simple displaying of ID is sufficient to get the authorities to move on to the next person.
For all the good this is doing, they might as well board the bus and ask people to show their house key, or their hairbrush. If we’re going to have our liberty infringed for security purposes, it would be nice to be able to believe that the measures being taken might actually be having some effect.
Remember, all 19 September 11 hijackers had valid ID, many of them American drivers’ licenses.
I think this type of ID check qualifies for inclusion in this thread.
Well, that’s always appropriate, of course. Thanks for the kind words, which I don’t deserve.
The more I learn about the general set-up, the less I like it. Several sources repeat the claim that the bus Ms. Davis rode “crosses through the Federal Center” and seem to interpret that to mean that she and the other passengers, bus and all, were somehow gaining access to Federal facilities. This doesn’t seem to be accurate. “Federal Center” is the name of a few blocks in Lakewood that contain a lot of buildings owned or leased by various agencies like the U.S. Geological Survey. For logistical reasons, city buses continue to use the public streets touching on this area, and in fact the city’s about to build a transit station right up on the eastern edge of the 670 acres appropriated for the government. Kipling street, the route of Ms. Davis’ bus, runs north-south along that edge, and has a stop convenient to a gate built across one street into the general area. The federal agencies involved are indoors, inside various separate buildings which have doors and locks and security personnel to operate them. It’s hard to see how, even after Ms. Davis successfully flung herself from a speeding bus, she could be said to have gained access to anything other than the pavement of a public street, albeit one occupied by federal buildings to which she would not have been admitted. It is likewise hard to see how, remaining on the bus as she did, she (at the point she was arrested) could be perceived to be doing anything but leaving the area the officers who arrested her were ostensibly trying to protect. Fortunately I’m too jaded to be stung by the little irony that the only federal facility Ms. Davis could have managed to penetrate was the office she was dragged into by federal security.
For anyone else who wants to take a look:
http://rockyweb.cr.usgs.gov/outreach/dfc.html
http://www.aclu-co.org/news/pressrelease/release_photoid112305.htm
http://www.lakewood-colorado.org/business_parks/denverfedcenter.asp
“Those who sacrifice freedom for safety, deserve neither.”- Benjamin Franklin