Vanishing before your eyes:

American freedom to travel without a federal permit.

Freedom to travel by air goes first. Hearings were held Thursday (09/20/2007) on rules requiring anyone boarding a commercial air flight to receive prior federal approval.

"Your papers please," long a cliche of movies about totalitarian regimes, would permeate peacetime American travel. Unlike the Hollywood version, our commands would be issued by private organizations whose representatives would be identified in some thus far undisclosed manner.

Grounding decisions would be made in secret. They would be based on undisclosed reasons -- termed "intelligence" -- and imposed without explanation.

This is in keeping with proposals to further exempt the Department of Homeland Security's probably illegal Automatic Targeting System files from Privacy Act coverage.

The proposed rules seem to me to suggest that appeals would be limited to begging, pleading and correcting "erroneous information" if, perhaps through magic or telepathy, a grounded American could determine what to "correct."

All of this is rationalized by reference to 9/11, which would have been prevented by systems in place at the time had the Federal Aviation Administration and others not been asleep at the switch. As Stephen Fairfax, President, MTechnology, wrote recently in the Association for Computing Machinery's Risks:

One of the tragedies of September 11 is that there was ample, publicly available data to predict not only the method of attack, but the likely targets. Algerian terrorists hijacked Air France Flight 8969 during the Christmas holidays in 1994. (see http://www.msnbc.com/news/635213.asp for a recent summary of those events.) Their plan was to crash a fully fueled airliner into the Eiffel Tower. The plan failed, in large part due to the courage and resourcefulness of the crew, but also because the terrorists were not trained to fly the aircraft. The terrorists (who may have been associated with Osama Bin Laden) learned from their mistakes; in the US the FAA did not.

... Years of inaction by the FAA in the face of a new, very serious threat enabled the success of the later attacks.

What we see now is not sluggish correction of that catastrophic inaction. It is the broad application of the kind of regimentation applied earlier in Bush campaign strategies. An $80,000 settlement with Jeffery and Nicole Rank did not cure the Bush administration of its oppressive impulses or turn the ship of state sharply about.

In fact, broad official pressure for such regimentation, unless effectively opposed by those who love freedom, has broader effects than destructive new federal rules and laws, like those argued in the travel-permit hearings held Thursday.

We all saw evidence of those broad effects recently in police use of a Taser on a University Florida student who persisted in trying to question a candidate at a public forum.

Freedom of travel is being ground away and freedom of speech punished. Fascism is not a historic phenomenon for students to mull over or an ugly swear word to direct at banana republics. Though I am loathe to write the words, it is a possibility here among us.

For my part, I will not stand silent. My grandchildren must live free, as I have.