Johns in the news #1

I am not a big fan of John Gilmore. That’s not because of his accomplishments, which are many (including being one of Sun’s early employees, founder of Cygnus, which was open source when open source wasn’t cool, and driving force behind the Free S/WAN security project.) In general, he strikes me as obnoxious and overly opinionated. However, I have to give him his props: he has consistently defended the liberties of American citizens. Now he’s suing the Attorney General. Why? He believes that the current requirement to show photo ID at airports is unconstitutional, since (in his opinion) it violates our constitutionally protected rights to travel within the US and to be secure in our persons and papers. It doesn’t help that the TSA rule that requires this ID check is secret. See his lawsuit here.