Here's another gem from BoingBoing.net--last Friday they posted [http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/25/woman_charged_for_re.html|a nice little piece about a woman who refused to show ID on a public bus and ended up being arrested for it]. God bless a free America, right?
Anyway, so BoingBoing points us to the [http://www.papersplease.org/davis/|Deborah Davis page] at PapersPlease.org that explains the woman's problem like this:
One morning in late September 2005, Deb was riding the public bus to work. She was minding her own business, reading a book and planning for work, when a security guard got on this public bus and demanded that every passenger show their ID. Deb, having done nothing wrong, declined. The guard called in federal cops, and she was arrested and charged with federal criminal misdemeanors after refusing to show ID on demand.
On the 9th of December 2005, Deborah Davis will be arraigned in U.S. District Court in a case that will determine whether Deb and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show "papers" whenever a cop demands them.
Head on over to PapersPlease.org to read more about this and other ID-providing issues confronting America today.
You can also check out [http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4274023,00.html|an article] from RockyMountainNews.com for the official mainstream-news take on the story. (Mainly it actually bothers to mention that the bus was passing through some sort of federal center and this justifies the checking of IDs. The funny thing is that Davis claims they didn't match the IDs with names on any lists or even taking the names down. The question becomes, what good does it do to check IDs? Or were they just looking for Arab names?
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