If you've traveled on an airplane in the last six years, then you've been asked for identification. A lot. With parents who lived in different parts of the country, I traveled a lot both before and after September 11. Prior to that date (I think I actually flew in August 2001), you got asked for identification at the ticket counter, ostensibly to prove that the person on the ticket was actually the person who was flying. (Of course, if you were a terrorist, why would you ever use your real name? Furthermore, if you knew that airlines were checking for consistency, why would your ever have an ID -- even a fake one -- whose name didn't match the name on your ticket?)

Then, you got asked two ridiculous questions: "Have your bags been in your possession since you packed them?" Yes. "Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry anything for them?" No. What purpose do these questions serve? Would anyone ever carry a stranger's things on an airplane? Furthermore, the airline explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland -- which probably prompted the latter question -- was executed by a woman's boyfriend packing her suitcase full of plastic explosives. Not exactly someone unknown to her, and done without her knowledge, as well.

In any event, you got asked for identification just once.

Right after September 11, security was increased to require identification in two more places. Right before the "security checkpoint," you had to show your ID and boarding pass to (1) prove, again, that you were the person on the boarding pass, and (2) prove that you had a boarding pass, since only people who were actually flying somewhere could go past the security checkpoint (and so it remains today). Finally, before you boarded the plane, you had to show the gate agent your ID just to prove -- again -- that you were who you said you were.

All of this adds up to a sort of Wikipedia theory of security -- that is, if enough people analyze an individual throughout the boarding process, then if there are any inconsistencies, they'll be found due simply to the sheer number of people involved in analyzing that person. This assumes, of course, that each person involved -- the ticketing agent, the security screener, the gate agent -- are all equally proficient in security. At each point, though, each security officer is analyzing exactly the same information. If a fake ID gets someone past the ticketing agent, then why wouldn't it get past anyone else? Especially given that it's the ticketing agent who has access to the most information (he or she has access to a computer and a telephone, after all, and is the least hurried person in the process).

Nevertheless, since September 11, we've been asked to show our IDs multiple times before boarding a plane. They've since removed the requirement of showing an ID at the gate (this happened in about 2003, I think), but you are still required to show an ID at the ticket counter (assuming you didn't print your tickets from home and you're checking luggage; if both of these are true, then you can bypass the ticket counter altogether). Where does this get us?

KCTV-5 News in St. Louis, Mo., wanted to find out just how safe this requirement to show an ID (which is a federal law, but is a secret federal law, so you're not allowed to read the text of it; it's enough to know that it exists; cf. Gilmore v. Gonzales). For its investigative report, the station made, from scratch, a convincing-looking ID that contained no markings indicating that it was issued by any state or federal authority but merely appeared to look like such an ID. According to the station, reporters "made it through four security checkpoints in two major airports" with the completely, 100% fake IDs.

What does this prove? (1) The REAL ID Act will do nothing to help security, and if it does help security, then it doesn't do so enough to offset the privacy intrusions the act would require. An identification card with my name on it proves nothing beyond the fact that there is a name on that card. No one actually cross-references that information to make sure that it's true, and realistically, there's no way for that information to be verified. Identification cards don't work as a method of identity verification. Any bouncer at a bar in a college town can tell you that. Why don't ID cards work? Because they're not tied to anything. We're supposed to trust that the information on the card is true, even though there is no independent authority there to verify that the information is true. Such an authority would require privacy intrusion on a massive scale; in order to have true identity verification, we'd need something akin to bar code tattoos (cf. Idiocracy), but even then there's no guarantee that our identity as encoded in the barcode is our actual identity (again, cf. Idiocracy).

At the end of the day, security is about trust. The simplest method of security -- asking who's at the door when the doorbell rings -- is just as secure as requiring people to carry national ID cards everywhere they go, and assuming that those IDs are truthful. If the Land Shark has taught us anything, it's that we can't trust the person on the other side of the door when they say, "Candy gram!"