Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.postgazette.com/pg/pp/05058/462446.stm>


Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point
about privacy

He's unable to travel because he refuses to present a government-approved ID

Sunday, February 27, 2005
 By Dennis Roddy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


 SAN FRANCISCO -- John Gilmore's splendid isolation began July 4, 2002,
when, with defiance aforethought, he strolled to the Southwest Airlines
counter at Oakland Airport and presented his ticket. Dennis Roddy,
Post-Gazette


John Gilmore, beside a graffiti-covered wall, has his morning coffee at a
shop that's one block from his San Francisco home. The Bradford native
doesn't drive and has other travel restrictions, thanks to his challenge of
a law that the government won't allow him to see.

 The gate agent asked for his ID.

 Gilmore asked her why.

 It is the law, she said.

 Gilmore asked to see the law.

 Nobody could produce a copy. To date, nobody has. The regulation that
mandates ID at airports is "Sensitive Security Information." The law, as it
turns out, is unavailable for inspection.

 What started out as a weekend trip to Washington became a crawl through
the courts in search of an answer to Gilmore's question: Why?

 In post 9/11 America, asking "Why?" when someone from an airline asks for
identification can start some interesting arguments. Gilmore, who learned
to argue on the debate team in his hometown of Bradford, McKean County, has
started an argument that, should it reach its intended target, the U.S.
Supreme Court, would turn the rules of national security on end, reach deep
into the tug-of-war between private rights and public safety, and play
havoc with the Department of Homeland Security.

 At the heart of Gilmore's stubbornness is the worry about the thin line
between safety and tyranny.

 "Are they just basically saying we just can't travel without identity
papers? If that's true, then I'd rather see us go through a real debate
that says we want to introduce required identity papers in our society
rather than trying to legislate it through the back door through
regulations that say there's not any other way to get around," Gilmore
said. "Basically what they want is a show of obedience."

Dennis Roddy, Post-Gazette
There's no place like home for John Gilmore, who can't travel very far from
his San Francisco residence. The Bradford native refuses to give his
identification for flying.
Click photo for larger image.

 As happens to the disobedient, Gilmore is grounded. He is rich -- he
estimates his net worth at $30 million -- and cannot fly inside the United
States. Nor can he ride Amtrak, rent a room at most major hotels, or easily
clear security in the courthouses where his case, Gilmore v. Ashcroft, is
to be heard. In a time when more and more people and places demand some
form of government-issued identification, John Gilmore offers only his
49-year-old face: a study in stringy hair, high forehead, wire-rimmed
glasses, Ho Chi Minh beard and the contrariness for which the dot.com
culture is renowned.

 "I think of myself as being under regional arrest," he said. Even with $30
million in the bank, regional arrest can be hard. He takes the bus to and
from events at which he is applauded by less well-heeled computer techies
who flew in from around the country after showing a boarding pass and one
form of government-issued photo ID and arrived in rental cars that required
a valid driver's license and one major credit card.

 He was employee No. 5 at Sun Microsystems, which made Unix, the free
software of the Web, the world standard. He japed the government by
cracking its premier security code. He campaigned to keep the software that
runs the Internet free of charge. After he left Sun, Gilmore started his
own firm, sold it for more money than he seems to have bothered to count
and has since devoted his time to giving it away to favored causes: drug
law reform, a campaign to standardize computer voting machines and the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, something of an ACLU for the Information
Age.

 To some, Gilmore's argument is redolent of the conspiracy theories from
the black helicopter crowd.

 "That's the problem. How it sounds," Gilmore said. He waved his hands like
some Cassandra: "They have all these secret laws! The UFOs are coming! They
have guards at every airport!" Yes, he said, there is a certain odd flavor
to the notion that someone shouldn't have to show ID to board a plane, but
with magnetometers at the gates, guards with security wands, fortified
cockpit doors and sky marshals abounding, Gilmore is asking just how much
citizens are giving up when they hand their driver's licenses to a third
party, in this case an airline, where it is put into a database they cannot
see, to meet a law that, as it turns out, they are not allowed to read.

 Gilmore will show ID for an international flight because he doesn't expect
to set the rules for other nations.

 "I will show a passport to travel internationally. I'm not willing to show
a passport to travel in my own country," Gilmore said. "I used to laugh at
countries that had internal passports. And it's happened here and people
don't even seem to know about it."

>From geek to riches

 The passage of John Gilmore from a bespectacled proto-nerd from Bradford,
Pa., to the twice-wealthy privacy-rights pioneer of the dot.com West Coast
started in his father's living room, where he first suspected authority is
used simply because someone has it.

 When something was found broken or spilled or some other evidence of a
fractured rule surfaced, and the guilty party unknown, the elder Gilmore
would summon his four children to the living room.

 "He'd line us all up in the living room. Until one of us confessed, we
wouldn't get to leave. Eventually one of my younger brothers started
confessing to things he didn't do just so we could get out of there,"
Gilmore said.

 Gilmore's father was a mechanical engineer. John was born in York and the
family moved to Bradford, near the state's northern border with New York,
when he was small. Today, at his home in Haight-Ashbury, a place he named
Toad Hall, after the character from "The Wind in the Willows," Gilmore
keeps a small school photo. It shows him with a little-boy crew cut and
thick, half-rim eyeglasses, the kind that have been in and out of fashion
twice since the photo was taken in the mid-1960s.

 The young Gilmore was a strong student at the schools in Bradford. He took
to math. In high school, he became curious about computers. The 1960s were
an era in which computers enjoyed an almost mystical reputation; imputed by
popular culture with the power to deduce anything. One year, a team of
scientists entered data for the 1927 New York Yankees and the 1963 Los
Angeles Dodgers to see who would win -- an early "computer match." Babe
Ruth was even credited with a home run.

 It was easy for a bright boy to become curious about how something so
all-knowing worked.

 "When he was 12, for his birthday, he asked for an IBM manual," said his
mother, Pat Woodruff, who remarried after she and Gilmore's father divorced
20 years ago and returned to live in Bradford. "His floor used to be
littered with papers. I had no idea what he was doing."

 The University of Pittsburgh opened a branch campus in a building across
the street from his high school. In it, they placed a desk-sized IBM 360.
Gilmore started wandering over to learn FORTRAN, the punch-card programming
language that made the computer do complex mathematical calculations.

 The Pitt-Bradford library had a few computer books, and one of his high
school teachers got John a card.

 The family was about to move to Alabama when John began writing to the
company that printed up a $3 manual for computer use. The firm, Scientific
Time Sharing Corp., in Bethesda, Md., rented out computer time to companies
such as Arbitron and ABC News, which needed storage for vast databases.

 After the third or fourth correspondence, they wrote back to ask if he was
a customer. Gilmore wrote back that he was a high school student and he was
moving to Alabama.

 After completing high school in Alabama, Gilmore had two summer
internships behind him and a full-time job as the youngest geek in Bethesda.

 He had a few dollars in his pocket and a letter of acceptance from
Michigan State University. He used the money. The letter was of little use.
Computer science had not yet come into its own as an academic discipline.

 "Why pay someone to teach me computers when I can get someone to pay me to
learn them?" he reasoned.

Road trip

 When techies burn out, they tend not to do strange things. They are, by
nature, already a few degrees off plumb. So they revert to the ordinary.
Gilmore burned out in the late '70s. He got on a motorcycle and rode west.

 "He just packed up his stuff and moved off," Pat Woodruff said. "I don't
know where he went at this time."

 He went to New Mexico. Gilmore worked for a while in the lowest of
mechanical technologies: a traveling carnival. He ran the Tilt-A-Whirl.

 "You have to watch the thing closely and know when someone's going to lose
it, so you move back," he said.

 Dodging stomach contents kept him employed for a while. At one point he
moved in with New Mexico's most dysfunctional couple. The male in the
relationship found out the female was pregnant. An argument broke out. A
gun was produced. Gilmore forgot his lesson from the Tilt-A-Whirl. He
didn't duck. A bullet caught him in the hand. He finished his New Mexico
stay sleeping under a stairwell at the local college.

 He knocked around the country a bit more. Staying with a relative in
Jacksonville, Fla., Gilmore looked for a job at a local bank. "They said
they wouldn't hire me as a teller, but they'd be glad to hire me to run
their computer," he said.

 Eventually, Gilmore moved to San Francisco and took up computer
consulting. One day, a friend called. He'd gone to work for a startup firm
called Microsoft. The company's founder, a Harvard dropout named Bill
Gates, was selling Unix, a universal software on which the Internet would
be based, and he wanted Gilmore to find a way to make Unix work on the
computers of a prospective customer based at Stanford University. After a
job interview, Gilmore called the people at Stanford. They were starting a
company to be called Sun, short for Stanford University Network, and would
Gilmore like to be their first software employee.

 "I hired on at Sun because the work was interesting," he said. The pay was
just short of marginal.

 Thus did John Gilmore get rich by accident. Because he was on the ground
floor, his stock was worth more. Sun went public in 1986 and suddenly John
Gilmore was rich. He stayed on at Sun as a consultant until 1989, then
started his own company, Cygnus. A few years later, when he sold Cygnus, he
was, in the parlance of Silicon Valley, "loaded." That is to say he is not
ridiculously rich -- just wealthy enough to make trouble.

 He did.

 Gilmore, for instance, is blocked from most e-mail servers because he runs
what the industry calls an "open relay" on his computer server, tucked into
the basement of his house. People are able to send e-mail through it
without identifying themselves, raising the ire of the anti-spam movement.

 His server sits next to the remnants of what is known in the industry as
the "DES Cracker." It is a collection of computer chips, connected by a
spider web of circuitry that he built to overpower the most widely used
encryption system -- the same one used on ATMs and satellite dishes.

 "The government was recommending everybody use it. We did that to show it
wasn't worth relying on," Gilmore said. His own theory was that a privacy
program offered by the government isn't, by nature, likely to remain
private.

 By 1996, Gilmore's dislike of authority was in full bloom. At San
Francisco Airport, he refused to produce a driver's license for security
police.

 "The cop said, 'You want me to arrest you?' I said, 'I'd consider it an
honor.' " They honored him with an arrest. The district attorney dropped
the case.

 Gilmore has epilepsy, and because of that his driver's license was
suspended five years ago. He decided not to reapply because it is now
easier, when asked for a photo ID, to be able to say forthrightly that he
has none.

 More than $1 million of his money has gone to house and feed the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. On a given day, visitors can find a team of
lawyers meeting with young men and women, still pale from too much time
indoors, seeking counsel to protect them from the wrath of everyone from
the Recording Industry Association of America, which is trying to shut down
music file sharers, to federal regulators worried about the latest software
for encrypting e-mail communications.

 "He cares a great deal about privacy," said Lee Tien, a full-time
litigator at EEF. Because privacy is one of those things that disappears
without always being noticed right away, Tien and other EFF lawyers find
themselves fighting regulations nobody gets excited about right away.

 "Privacy discourse ends up being at one end, 'What have you got to hide?'
vs. 'Mind your own business,' " Tien said.

 "If John Gilmore were a country," adds his personal publicist, Bill
Scannell, "his motto would be 'Let Me Alone.' "

Conscious objection

 Rosa Parks did not ride that bus in Montgomery by accident. Several
strategy meetings preceded the famous ride in which the founding mother of
the civil rights movement boarded a bus and declined to sit in the back.

 Gilmore's famous visit to two airline ticket counters in the Bay Area was
charted out. He checked in with his lawyer. He kept notes. He booked a
flight from Oakland, with its slightly cheaper fares, to Washington, D.C.,
where he planned to drop in on the offices of his member of congress, U.S.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, to convey his growing concern about the
amount of data the government is gathering from and about its citizens.

 His reason for travel, he would later say, was "to petition the government
for redress." That added First Amendment issues to a Constitutional
exercise that would also turn on the amendments against unreasonable search
and seizure and the right to assemble and petition the government for
redress of grievances.

 Everything went pretty much according to expectations. That is to say,
everything went to hell in a hurry.

 As Gilmore tells it, he arrived at the gate two hours early, a paper
ticket purchased through a travel agent in his hand. A Southwest agent
asked for his ID. Gilmore, in turn, asked her if the ID requirement was an
airline rule or a government rule. She didn't seem to know. Gilmore argued
that if nobody could show him the law, he wasn't showing them an ID.

 They reached a strange agreement for an argument about personal privacy:
In lieu of showing ID, Gilmore would consent to an extra-close search,
putting up with a pat-down in order to keep his personal identity to
himself. He was wanded, patted down and sent along.

 As Gilmore headed up the boarding ramp a security guard yanked him from
line. According to court papers, a security agent named Reggie Wauls
informed Gilmore he would not be flying that day.

 "He said, 'I didn't let you fly because you said you had an ID and
wouldn't show it,' " Gilmore said. "I asked, 'Does that mean if I'd left it
at home I'd be on the plane?' He said, 'I didn't say that.' "

 The Gilmore case is, if anything, about things unsaid. Gilmore -- and
millions of other people -- are daily instructed to produce some manner of
ID: a driver's license, a Social Security number, a phone number, date of
birth. When Gilmore asked to see the rules explaining why his photo ID is
necessary for airline security, his request was denied. The regulation
under which the Transportation Safety Administration, an arm of the
Department of Homeland Security, instructs the airlines to collect such
identification is classified as "Sensitive Security Information."

 When Congress passes a law, it is as often as not up to some agency to
decide what that law means and how to enforce it. Usually, those
regulations are available for people to examine, even challenge if they
conflict with the Constitution.

 This wasn't the case when Congress passed the Air Transportation Security
Act of 1974. The Department of Transportation was instructed to hold close
information that would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal
privacy" or "reveal trade secrets" or "be detrimental to the safety of
persons traveling in air transportation."

 The Federal Aviation Administration, then a branch of the transportation
department, drew up regulations that established the category now known as
Sensitive Security Information.

 When the responsibility for air travel safety was transferred to the newly
created Transportation Safety Administration, which was in turn made a
branch of the new Department of Homeland Security, the oversight for
Sensitive Security Information went with it. The language in the Homeland
Security Act was broadened, subtly but unmistakably, where SSI was
concerned.

 It could not be divulged if it would "be detrimental to the security of
transportation."

 "By removing any reference to persons or passengers, Congress has
significantly broadened the scope of SSI authority," wrote Todd B.
Tatelman, an attorney for the Congressional Research Office. Tatelman was
asked by Congress last year to look at the implications of Gilmore's case.

 Tatelman's report found that the broadened language essentially put a
cocoon of secrecy around 16 categories of information, such as security
programs, security directives, security measures, security screening
information "and a general category consisting of 'other information.' "

 The government has been so unyielding on disclosure that men with the name
David Nelson suddenly found themselves ejected from flights. Somewhere in
the system, the name came up on the newly created "No Fly" list. Sen.
Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., found himself in the same dilemma. When baggage
screeners were caught pilfering, prosecutions were dropped because a trial
would require a discussion of "Sensitive Security Information."

 When John Gilmore demanded proof that the airport ID rule met
Constitutional muster, the government at first declined to acknowledge it
even existed.

 Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for TSA, tacitly acknowledged the strange rabbit
hole into which Gilmore has fallen. The Department of Justice, in its first
response to Gilmore's suit two years ago, declined to acknowledge whether
such an instruction existed. Later, it admitted its existence. Then the
government asked a judge to hold a hearing in secret and preclude Gilmore's
lawyers from seeing the regulation they sought to challenge, the contents
of which seem to be pretty widely known.

 "It's a rubber stamp. TSA security directives are -- plural -- sensitive
security information and not subject to public disclosure," Davis said.

 How, then, is someone to challenge in court a law he's not allowed to see?

 "I have no idea," Davis said. "If a passenger doesn't wish to show ID
prior to getting a boarding pass, that's something they're going to have to
take up with the air carrier. And the air carrier is required to obtain
government-issued identification."

 That, says Gilmore's lawyer, Jim Harrison, is the enigma of the case:
"It's about the ability of the citizens of this country to be able to move
about the country, to move about freely, without being subject to laws they
can't see."

 The legal cul-de-sac erected around airport security is not limited to
Gimore's deliberately chosen fight. In October 2001, at San Francisco
Airport, Arshad Chowdhury, born and raised in the United States, was
surrounded by security agents and kept off a Northwest Airlines flight. He
was trying to get back to Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a
graduate student.

 Chowdhury's last name sounded somewhat like another name on the no-fly
list. He could never get an explanation. He filed suit against Northwest,
but, to date, his court fight has been with the government, which has
pleaded Sensitive Security Information.

 To sue Northwest for racial profiling, Chowdhury must first sue his own
government for the rules Northwest will plead it was enforcing.

High-tech togetherness

 Code Con is one of those technological events so deep that ordinary
conversation requires an English-to-English translator. A young woman was
onstage explaining a system she had developed to, as it turns out, automate
trust in discussion groups by assigning a ranking of credibility to
participants based on past messages and reactions. Discussion boards must
either be moderated, to keep the wackos from disrupting them, or wide open,
in which case postings can take unreasonably long times.

 As she spoke, half the audience inside a darkened nightclub rented for the
event stared into the blue glow of laptop computers. Some were following
the PowerPoint presentation on a Web site set up for the affair.

 Dan Klein, a Pittsburgh computer consultant, was in the back of the room.
He has known Gilmore for years, and to know Gilmore is to know the room.
Computer programmers, the really good ones, combine an artistic temperament
with a conviction that intuitive reasoning can lead to mathematical
certainty.

 "It's elegant thinking," Klein said. "We are most of us white hats, but we
think like black hats."

 The elegance of Gilmore's thinking is that knowing someone's ID does not
prevent the person from committing a terrorist act. The 9/11 hijackers had
driver's licenses. Knowing someone's identity, as Gilmore argues it, adds
less to a security than it takes away from a traveler's protection from
authority that might oppress simply because it can.

 "It's just rebellion against oppression," Klein said. "Part of it is this
sense of 'Why do I have to follow all these rules when they don't make any
sense?' "

 The young woman finished her speech, took a few questions and, just as
everyone was about to rise for lunch, Scannell, a peripatetic man who
orbits around both the techies and the world of PR, was on the stage. He
had a special request. He had just become a parent and wanted to put in a
wireless baby monitor. Could someone come up with a way to encrypt a baby
monitor so outsiders couldn't pick up the signal?

 By day's end a few people had approached with ideas. It is doubtful anyone
would bother to listen in on a baby gurgling, but this was the principle of
the thing: meeting the people who know the math to make it work.

 Soon afterward, 14 Code Con attendees flooded into a nearby Italian
restaurant. Gilmore sat at one end of the table, chatted privacy, travel
and whether the drug called Ecstasy has a medicinal application. Then, to
save time, he picked up everyone's check. In cash. No credit cards. Why
leave a paper trail?

 That night, he caught a ride home with a friend. The night before was more
to his liking. On a bus running through San Francisco to Haight-Ashbury, a
multimillionaire sat alone in a seat next to a woman who appeared to be
homeless. Neither knew who the other one was. All John Gilmore had to show
to get on board was a $1.25 fare. That's how he likes it.


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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