On Christmas day a young Nigerian man boarded a flight from Lagos to Amsterdam and then later boarded a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. About an hour outside of Detroit, as the plane was descending over Canadian airspace he decided that his religion would martyr him if he blew up the plane using a slab of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (aka PETN) taped to his crotch. Unfortunately for him and fortunately for the plane’s passengers the igniter failed and he merely started his crotch on fire and probably blew up his testicles.
As expected, the TSA felt a need to respond to yesterday’s threat today. Apparently it is now a threat to have more than one carry on, electronics in the main cabin on international flights, anything in your lap, and to go to the bathroom within one hour of the flight landing. I’ll leave the sanity of these for other people. What I’m interested in is the way that the TSA shared this information.
The primary way that travelers are told to stay up to date on the ever changing regulations regarding flight security is to visit the TSA home page. Here’s a screen capture of the home page from December 27th, more than 48 hours after the incident on Northwest 253:
The TSA has a statement on flight 253, but there is nothing about the new flight restrictions, despite the fact that I'm sure that I, and thousands of other people, were concerned about how their flights home may be impacted.
The digerati may have also checked Twitter for information. The TSA doesn’t have an official Twitter feed, but their blog team has a Twitter feed. Here’s a screen capture of the Twitter feed taken at the same time:
There is a link to an [article on the TSA's blog about Northwest 253](http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/12/dhs-statement-on-northwest-airlines.html), but the article is merely the official statement and contains nothing about the changing regulations. For more than 48 hours passengers were left to wonder about the changing regulations and how these regulations impact travel in the holiday season. The primary source of the changing regulations was a message on [Air Canada's web site](http://www.aircanada.com/en/news/trav_adv/091226_3.html).
Finally, late on the 27th the actual text of the regulations was finally made available, but not through an easy source on TSA’s website. Instead, we’re forced to go to Christopher Elliott’s full text of the directive.
The administration has been quiet on the issue, but I believe that is more by design. There’s no need to send everyone off to Sunday morning talk shows because a terrorist decided to try and blow his own balls off. What isn’t acceptable is the long delay and horrible communication regarding the new restrictions for travelers. There’s lots more that could be written on this, but I’m trying to minimize editorializing in this article.