Gilmore v Gonzales

Papers, Please has the scoop on Gilmore v Gonzales.  Gilmore is one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, who has used his fortune to do good deeds (such as his involvement with the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and fight crime.  Gonzales is the Attorney General of the United States, and his job is to fight crime.  Unfortunately, they are both working on slightly different definitions of what a crime is.

Specifically, Gonzales thinks that it's a crime to allow someone to board an airplane without identifying themselves with some form of government-issued identification.  Gilmore thinks forcing someone to present government-issued identification to travel is a crime.  There's an obvious conflict here, and the Supreme Court may be the one to decide who's right.   A petition for certiorari [PDF] has been filed.

The last case we saw addressing this issue was Hiibel.  That didn't turn out so well -- the Supreme Court upheld the conviction for failure to identify to a police officer.  Hopefully we'll get a better result this time, but frankly, I have slim hopes for a major change so soon after the earlier ruling.