Denver's Police State

http://www.papersplease.org/davis/facts.html

Read this link. Really, read it.

Next Stop: Big Brother

Meet Deborah Davis. She's a 50 year-old mother of four who lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Her kids are all grown-up: her middle son is a soldier fighting in Iraq. She leads an ordinary, middle class life. You probably never would have heard of Deb Davis if it weren't for her belief in the U.S. Constitution.

This is not America. When honest, law-abiding citizens can't commute to work on a city bus without a demand for their 'papers', something is very, very wrong.

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.

Now, I'm no alarmist. I think the militia folks out in the AZ dessert are a little batty, but this smacks of state control like nothing I've heard for some time.

Seems this women was asked for her ID on a bus that happened to go through a federal facility area (just the area, mind you, and this is a public transportation open to the world bus).

Read the story. The summation is she refused to show her ID because she'd learned long ago there is no law requiring it and it bugged her doing it. It was a principle thing (do we live in a gulag pro-1990 soviet state? not last time we checked, or, so I thought until reading this). She was arrested, dragged to the police station and is being charged with a multitude of ‘crimes’. All for being, as the story notes ‘uppity’.

We need a degree of authority. We need laws. But we also need our constitution and our freedoms.

Anyone who says 'someone who has nothing to hide shouldn't have a problem with it' wasn't around in 1770 when search (and seizure) without warrants where common. That's why we have a constitution: to protect against this kind of behavior in the face of randomly applied authority.