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Paul: Thanks for your comments, and thanks for your link to the new biometric passport information. It's a worthwhile short article, and I'd recommend it.
In replying to you here, I want to step carefully, as this discussion could easily get back into the partisan political debates that harmed this board in the past. A number of the participants on here have indicated that they would like this board to be free of politics, and Mauro and I agree that we'd rather have the board be slow, rather than engage in that kind of controversy again.
I say all this because, if others reply either to my comments or to Paul's, please be careful in how you frame your remarks.
Paul, I haven't been outside the US since the 9/11 incident, so I can't comment first-hand about how id's are checked. However, I used to travel by air to Canada frequently (including weekly, for 6 months), and have also been through the auto border checkpoints from Canada back to the US, and from Mexico back to the US, as well as the pedestrian border checkpoints from Mexico back to the US. But, again, not since 9/11. I will add that there are additional immigration checkpoints along the freeways between the San Diego and the Los Angeles areas (maybe 50-75 miles or so inland from the Mexican border, I estimate), and I have been through those countless times before 9/11, and probably a dozen times or so since 9/11.
I seem to recall that at some border checkpoints, people are asked to choose between the "returning American" line and an "other" line, and at other checkpoints, there is just one line. Pretty much in either case, an immigration or customs official asks you your nationality, the purpose of your trip, etc.
These days, I don't know how they deal with the returning American who doesn't have a passport on their person. I think in the "old days" they used to make some judgment about one's accent, how one dressed, etc., to determine if that person "seemed" like a returning American. Perhaps (hopefully!) they had additional training to make that assessment. (I think in every case but one, I always had my passport with me. I do not know what they do these days. I would imagine that the burden of proof is higher on returning without having a passport.
I should add that the identification problem here is a bit complex, because each (of 50) states issues its own drivers licenses. (There's no national drivers license: part of that aversion to a national id system I mentioned in the earlier post.) It used to be the case that most states used a photo id, but some did not. (Perhaps that's now changed, and that all states now issue a photo id. -- Hopefully someone who knows for sure can chime in here.)
Thus, those people whose job is to check identifications (border agents, airline check-in personnel, bank personnel, etc.), need to be familiar with 50 different formats of id. (I used to work in a bank 20+ years ago, and we had reference materials to illustrate what to look for with out-of-state id; we could spot fake California id's pretty well back then, but needed help with other states.)
As I read through your post, I do think you're correct that the American political climate is such that the goal is to improve security and safety, especially at the borders, while minimizing the disruption to the general public. International travel and border-crossing, except at certain cities where the metropolitan area spills over into another country (Detroit, San Diego, El Paso, for instance), is still a pretty rare event for the majority of Americans.
However, although you indicate that the planes used were domestic, they were hi-jacked by people from other countries. And I think that one of the things that came to light after that event is that the US government was not doing a good job of keeping track of all the foreign visitors (whether tourist, student, worker, or permanent resident) entering the country, and especially was not following up on people who stayed past the expiration of their visa. It seems like these tightened measures are part of the way they're trying to do a better job of that.
But the treatment of "foreigners" is not uniquely an American problem. As someone who has lived in 2 other countries and travelled in numerous ones, I've been on the receiving end of the "foreigner" problem. Back when you had to go through a border checkpoint at each country crossing in Europe, I went through some pretty brutal treatment when I was a college student (including a "cavity search" with West German officials), and have had several friends arrested in Japan who were US citizens but didn't look "American"; they were always accused of carrying fake id, and took days to get released; one of them was the wife of a Citibank executive, so it wasn't just "rough-looking" people. She was accused each time of being a prostitute, by the way. A very ugly situation.) I could site many other examples. My point is, I don't think it's a uniquely American phenomenon to have taller hoops for "foreigners" to jump through than a country's citizens.
Finally, I'm not sure the problem with people here, high school students or not, taking guns and going wild has anything to do with the identification problem we're discussing. While a tragedy, regrettably repeated again recently, you would not find unanimity here on either the origins of the problem nor the solutions for it. (And this board would not be the appropriate place to debate those problems and solutions.)
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I'll be interested to hear from Jaume on this.
