If you have some time on your hands ... go to an airport and try to get on a plane without showing ID. They aren't supposed to arrest you for trying this ...

Well, as an aside, I can report that I recently traveled with an unlaminated, black-and-white laser-printed-on-ordinary-card-stock "temporary" ID (issued by the Registry of Motor Vehicles) and I had no trouble. No one looked at this ordinary piece of card stock and decided to go run it through a database.

Can you fly without ID? According to what the government told the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the Gilmore case, you can – you need only submit to secondary screening in order to fly anonymously.

I seriously doubt this is true in practice. As I boarded a flight in February, I sat down across the aisle from a couple who were explaining that their traveling companions were unable to accompany them on that flight because one of them had forgotten his identification card at home that morning. While I was not an eyewitness to the negotiation with TSA, I can confidently conclude that the TSA agent in authority that day did not offer to subject him to a secondary screening in lieu of the ID requirement, because missing this first flight was going to cause him to miss an international connecting flight later that day. I don't know how emphatically the would-be traveler pleaded, "Isn't there something you can do?", but he was probably not aware of the 9th circuit's decision in the Gilmore case.

RE: Can you really fly without showing ID?