What am I missing here? They've boiled this down to completely trivial examples that ignore the gross violations in Constitutional rights via gagged court orders, NSLs, FISA warrants and courts, warrantless wiretapping, etc, etc. They're debating the need for having IDs to buy alcohol as a defense of secret government laws that are meant for protection.
This is the quint-essential "security vs liberty" and "governmental security through obscurity". It's old, I've been debating it for years. Frankly, it's intellectually weak.
You seem to be taking an absolutist position against secrecy. Personally, I'd argue that such a position is completely untenable if you want a country that survives its first conflict, but that's not really relevant.
What is relevant is the following:
* Moving the discussion away from "secrecy is always evil" and toward discussing specific instances.
* Acknowledging that a court ruling can be legally correct even if you personally would disagree with the results of that ruling.
* Learning to avoid reflex reactions and instead actually digging to see what happened and evaluating arguments.
One is that the court case hinged on the claim that the policy was secret. The court's response was that the ID requirement was clearly posted for everyone to see, and that when Gilmore asked about it, he was told how he could fly without presenting ID. Legally, this is entirely correct.
Another is that secrets are not automatically the end of the world. Secret rules aren't even illegal, much less unconstitutional; if that were the case, many defense-related regulations, which do have the force of law, would have to go out the window, and effective national defense would be essentially impossible.
A third is a lurking suspicion that if we remove the bogeyman g-word ("government") from the picture, the stock responses on HN would be wildly different.
If instead we had a cabal of airline executives who'd formed a cartel of sufficient clout to quash all competition, and they agreed amongst themselves to implement contracts requiring all passengers to present ID but refused to make public the details of their agreement, I'm almost certain there would be people here loudly defending it. It would be a noble triumph of free-market capitalism. The passengers would obviously be negotiating away their "rights" through a free and fair exchange protected by the holy sanctity of contract. But of course, in that case it would just be a shadowy cabal of possibly unknown people who aren't bound by any rules anywhere (we must never interfere in the free market), rather than a cabal of publicly-identifiable people who are accountable to the Constitution and to elections.