It drives me crazy when I hear people say, “The Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans!” - especially after I read things like this:

Should you have to ask for permission from the government before you are allowed to get on a plane or cruise ship?

The Department of Homeland Security has proposed that airlines and cruise ships be required to get individual permission (”clearance”) from the DHS for each individual passenger on all flights to, from, or via the U.S. Unless the answer is “Yes” — if the answer is “no” or “maybe”, or if the DHS doesn’t answer at all — the airline wouldn’t be allowed to give you a boarding pass, or let you or your luggage on the plane or ship.

The Identity Project, along with the World Privacy Forum and John Gilmore, has filed comments with the DHS objecting to this proposal as a violation of international human rights, First Amendment rights, and privacy and government accountability laws.

This is the third of three identification-related “rulemakings” in the last month and a half in which the DHS has proposed to restrict the right to travel. IDP has filed formal objections to each of these proposals:

Expansion of US-VISIT fingerprinting, photographing, and lifetime dossiers on visitors to include permanent U.S. residents (green card holders).

The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative to require passports for travel between the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Conversion of the Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) for international ships and plane travel into an advance permission system.

Remind me again that we’re nothing like Germany in the 1930’s:

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German” could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - “Resist the beginnings” and “consider the end.” But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings.”