The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Monday to hear a challenge to the secrecy surrounding the Transportation Security Agency's rules requiring that U.S. citizens provide identification to board domestic airline flights or submit to additional security screening.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled against the plaintiff, civil-rights activist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Gilmore, nearly a year ago. In November, a coalition of eight groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), filed a court brief supporting Gilmore's request for information about the secretive rules.

"'Security' shouldn't be a magic password allowing the government to escape accountability," Marcia Hofmann, staff attorney for the EFF, said in a statement published at the time. "The Supreme Court should hear this case and review why the TSA insists on keeping this basic information secret."

After 9-11, the Bush Administration has increasingly used secrecy to guard non-classified but sensitive information from potentially being used by terrorists to plan an attack while increasingly exercising surveillance powers. Government agencies have pulled information from the Web, while previously unclassified documents have been resealed. Meanwhile, the EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed lawsuits over the National Security Agency's use of wiretaps to spy on American citizens who are suspected of ties to terrorism.

The TSA maintained in court documents that secrecy was necessary to ensure the security of passengers, while the EFF argued that the rules amounted to unconstitutionally secretive laws. The Supreme Court justices made no comment in denying (PDF) the appeal.