There was also a time you did not need a government issued ID to get on a plane. That also changed, for obvious reasons, but not necessarily good ones. Fear of

There was also a time you did not need a government issued ID to get on a plane. That also changed, for obvious reasons, but not necessarily good ones. Fear of the unknown is not equivalent to rationality. The worst government policies are those where "concerned mother" (= Democrat) and "stern dad" (= Republican) stand shoulder to shoulder to protect you from yourself. Millions of people are in regular contact with that sort of "stern + concerned" thing in the form of the TSA, but other agencies are no less Kafkaesque (more so in fact given that they are operating in comparative darkness). You can stand on a street corner and call yourself a programmer willing to work for $5. Or for zero. That doesn't mean that GE will hire you to write the code for their next X-ray machine. Distributed intelligence is much smarter, and centralized evaluation much dumber, than many believe.