What an incredible display of narrow-mindedness here. What I read that if I am some government official sitting behind some desk somewhere, I can lay down any rule or restriction on you violate any amount of your freedom guaranteed to you by the Constitution and as long as I say it is for your security you’ll eat it up.
This is dumb thinking. You have to consider the potential repercussions here and also understand that it does nothing to guarantee your safety in any way shape of form. First, you are giving all your private information to some $25k a year ticket counter agent. So, they know everything about you,(Ex. how many divorces you've had, problem with your creditors, religion, etc. Anything affiliated with your SSN which basically has your whole history) and you know nothing about them. The potential for abuse at this point is incredible because you get one crooked ticket agent who uses your information for his personal gain, then you are fucked. Your credit is toast as well as your background because there is no telling what that person can do in your name. That is just the beginning, you are basically giving you very private information to many people who can use it against you or for their personal gain. You also have no control as to who can get this info, you don't know how many eyes will be on you personal shit. This information is private for a reason, the abuse potential is incredible. That's why you never give your fucking SSN over the phone, the potential for abuse is very high. And that is if the government itself is completely honest and you ought to know better than that. Who's going to protect your credit and good name when your not flying? We're good folks, but not that good. I knew a guy who had his identity stolen once, The suffering was incredible, clearing his name took eight years and $20K +.
Second, question I don't see being asked is how in the hell is this going to help stop air terror? You have to think like a terrorist for a minute. If you are going to the airport to do something nasty, are you going to do it with your real identity knowing that it can draw suspicion? No, you will have a squeaky clean identity giving you the "green" light to fly. And that's one way. If they are well organized the ticket agent will be a terrorist too and make things that much easier.
Also, this system will only affect U.S. citizens or resident aliens. If you are here on vacation, a work visa, or temporary residence, you are from another country and you don't have a SSN, then you effectively don't have a background to check. What are they going to do, not let them fly? Again, major flaw in the plan.
Lastly, seeing 9/11 up close and personal has nothing to do with whether or not background and credit checks are the right thing to do. Those terrorist got on those planes with out violating a single solitary law until they hijacked the plane. If they did a background check on those guys, they would have been clean because this one event is what they did wrong, they weren't troublemakers up to this point. So this "security" measure wouldn't have helped.
When are people going to realize that most of these "security" measures are a load of crap. If you are an intelligent terrorist, none of this is going to stop you. You just have to modify your plans. Also America is full of soft targets for a terrorist. There are at least a million ways to kill a bunch of people and simultaneously devastate our economy, they don't have to get on an airplane to do it. Justifying privacy intrusions in name of security is just plain stupid. All it does is make individuals more vulnerable to potential abuse than is does keeping the sky's safer. Who is going to protect you if your private information gets hijacked for purposes of evil? A line has to drawn somewhere. The argument "If you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to worry about" is a slippery slope. You can use that argument to justify anything up to even putting cameras in your house and car, 'cause if you ain't doing anything wrong than you should have nothing to worry about. Our ancestors came here to start a new nation because they were suffering from the same kind of thing in their homelands. Now we want to do it here and it is ok with most of you. You need to wake up. Yall freaked out about ephadrine, but you don't care about your privacy.