I have a, possibly naive, question for Americans: Why isn't this a political issue? From all I read, TSA seems to be universally loathed. Then it should be easy to change in a democracy. Why is it so hard?
It's hard because we elect one representative and two senators to represent us on every issue. The highest-controversy issues get the spotlight, while other very important issues are ignored. There's no way to say "I like this about Rep. X, but don't like her stance on issue Y," in the voting booth.
That's not to say that interstate air travel is outside of the scope of the feds, but that there's so much scope creep in Congress that it's hard to focus on that come election season.
Section 8 specifically lists the powers reserved to Congress. Neither the Executive branch nor the Supreme Court is given this treatment. (Side note: patents are specifically listed here: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;")
Section 9 deals with a few other things such as immigration, ex post facto laws, taxes and spending money. Section 10 is rules on what states can't do.
Furthermore, Amendment 10 reads:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The government does have power to step out of this specific list, due to the "necessary and proper" clause, but in general this used to be considered a clause where the government can do whatever is "necessary and proper" to exercise their duty to govern within their enumerated powers. This is spelled out by Justice Marshall in McCulloch vs. Maryland: "If the end be legitimate, and within the scope of the Constitution, all the means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, and which are not prohibited, may constitutionally be employed to carry it into effect."
However, later on in his opinion he also states: "This Government is acknowledged by all to be one of enumerated powers. The principle that it can exercise only the powers granted to it would seem too apparent to have required to be enforced by all those arguments which its enlightened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted. But the question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise so long as our system shall exist."
This has always been a tricky question. There is a limit on Congress' power. While it is not limited simply to those listed in the Constitution, everybody that I know thinks Congress has overstepped their boundaries countless times.
The trouble is that we the people are no longer invested in our government and don't properly hold them to account. We elect people who benefit me the most, as opposed to the country. This is normal, but when you couple that with a court system that is overloaded and an executive branch that is, frankly, out of control and insanely drunk with power, bad government happens.
Imagine being able to break things down so that we elect economic & taxation reps separately from the people who make laws. Sure, there's already some split between the House & Senate, but they're not exactly compartmentalized in the way I'm envisioning right now.
A democracy would indeed find it easy to change such things as the TSA. Unfortunately a democracy would also find it easy to, say, change the rules of evidence governing proof of your guilt, because their perception of you is that you are bad and need to be punished, and the court system is one way to do that.
It is the tragedy of democracies that it is easy to make major decisions hastily whose consequences are either not understood well or understood all too well by a few for their own advantage.
Protection of minorities include at least freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, property rights, the rule of law and strong, independent institutions to enforce these.
Voting is mostly useful for facilitating peaceful periodic transfers of power, as opposed to chaotic, even bloody, revolutions.
Meanwhile you have a struggling economy, attempts to ban scientific progress, shutting down the internet, inequality for minorities, the list goes on
Only a very small portion of Americans are on Hacker News, so don't assume the TSA is universally loathed.
We don't have the equivalent of the TSA here in Australia and I don't feel any less safe for it.
The measures that we're upset about are due to some prominent security failures of the TSA, mostly to do with private individuals using plastic explosives. The most prominent were the shoe bomber (thus now we take off our shoes) and the underwear bomber (thus now you must either let them take a naked picture of you, or else submit to the Freedom Fondling of your genitals to look for such things). However, other intrusive regulations like "don't take a bottle of Pepsi on-board, it will be confiscated" come from a failed "liquid explosives" plan which we caught before they put it into action. The underwear and shoe bombs got right through the TSA's security screening, and were defeated by passengers noticing that people were trying to set weird things on fire.
People have been upset about the stupidity of airport security since before 2001; George Carlin's rant on airport security was in 1999, you can find it on YouTube easily. His ringing words, "Haven't found anything yet, haven't found one bomb in one bag" still rings true, surprisingly enough. We even found plastic explosive charges in cargo planes -- but only because counterintelligence sources intercepted the information of the plan and told us where to look. These guys digging around in your bags never did.
Let me tell you what's wrong here, in one brief statement. You know what happened when I last went through a naked body scanner? It went off loudly. You would think that this means that I would be a very sorry person indeed. No. They lazily took me aside, looked at where the computer software had drawn a circle (around my head), decided that it was probably detecting my ponytail as a false alarm, and whisked me on my way.
Wait, you say, you mean their alarms went off and they yawned? That's correct. Your chance of being a real unidentified terrorist is probably smaller than one in a hundred million. Their machine's false positive rate is probably larger than one in a thousand. That means that even if their machine goes off, there's only a one-in-a-hundred-thousand chance that you're a serious threat. The officer who deals with you will be conditioned by the last hundred non-threatening people he has very thoroughly investigated, and has started to say, "okay, yeah, boring. This person looks as trustworthy as the last hundred. I guess I'll let them pass."
I don't know how al-Qaeda feels about our new TSA policies, but it's probably laughable when compared to their fear of our military drones. The TSA probably doesn't make any terrorist afraid.
Nothing has changed. There have always been terrorists. 9/11 was just the first time this particular kind of attack was used.
That vulnerability was patched out the very next day (or otherwise quickly) - locked cockpit doors and air marshalls. Add to that the bonus of any guy standing up to hijack a plane will likely be throttled by angry passengers.
These checks are _not_ a necessity. We could go back to private screeners and metal detectors and be safe enough.
Freedom is it's own end: true before, true now.
And never mind that the TSA does absolutely zilch to make us any safer anyway.