Wampum

Yes, I know. Secret laws is oxymoronic. Nonetheless, it appears that we have them. Kevin Drum has the story from News.com:

A federal appeals court wrestled Thursday with what seems to be a straightforward question: Can Americans be required to show ID on a commercial airline flight?

John Gilmore, an early employee of Sun Microsystems and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the answer should be "no." The libertarian millionaire sued the Bush administration, which claims that the ID requirement is necessary for security but has refused to identify any actual regulation requiring it.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed skeptical of the Bush administration's defense of secret laws and regulations but stopped short of suggesting that such a rule would be necessarily unconstitutional.
"How do we know there's an order?" Judge Thomas Nelson asked. "Because you said there was?"

Replied Joshua Waldman, a staff attorney for the Department of Justice: "We couldn't confirm or deny the existence of an order." Even though government regulations required his silence, Waldman said, the situation did seem a "bit peculiar."

"This is America," said James Harrison, a lawyer representing Gilmore. "We do not have secret laws. Period." Harrison stressed that Gilmore was happy to go through a metal detector.

I see nothing wrong with requiring ID before boarding a plane. The idea that we can have secret laws is beyond ridiculous and into the realm of the truly scary. If we do have secret laws, how do we make sure we do not run afoul of them? If the text of the laws are secret, how does any court or defendant know if the law has been violated? Secret laws are an open invitation for enforcement only against those of whom the powers that be disapprove.