New TSA security guidelines means no iPods one hour before landing

John Brownlee ()

New TSA security guidelines means no iPods one hour before landingOn Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — who is believed to be linked to al Qaeda — attempted to ignite an explosive device made of pentaerythritol on a plane as it neared Detroit, and promptly had his ass kicked for him by fellow passengers. Hooray! Christmas was saved! But that’s not going to stop the grinches at the US Transporation Authority from making your holiday traveling a paranoid nightmare: they have just issued revised travel restrictions for all flights coming into the United States, and those restrictions mean some pretty profound inconveniences for gadget lovers.

According to the official TSA Security Directive, all passengers must now be subjected to a thorough pat-down before they board the plane. All planes must have their passenger communications systems disabled through the flight, which includes phone, GPS and internet services. Finally, starting in the last hour of the flight, passengers are not only not allowed to leave their seats… they aren’t allowed to have any personal items on their laps or in front of them. That means no iPods, no iPhones, no MacBooks… not even a book. Swell.

As usual, then, what we are looking at is totally ineffective retrograde security measures that only make traveling more inconvenient and frightening for innocent travelers, while terrorists will continue to get around them. What’s most ironic is the old security measures — if they’d been successfully implemented — would already have stopped Abdulmutallab at the gate. That means that even the new security measures wouldn’t have stopped him, because the failure was one of implementation. And Abdulmutallab didn’t even have an iPod.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • Charli

    Mr Flaming Groin had a syringe that passed security but no one seems to be asking how. Or why there were no chemical sniffers (dog, machine etc) at the security checkpoint to detect the load in his shorts.
    Also, do we know when he retrieved the syringe. perhaps he had it for a while and it was happenstance that he did it right before they landed. he could have had it for a couple of hours.
    also, electronics, etc played no part in his scheme so why target them. and why the no GPS. anyone with a watch can calculate when to set their shorts aflame or anything else just by the arrival time.
    what we need is better security to keep guys like this (who was apparently reported to the US Embassy as a possible threat but allowed to get on the flight) and bomb bits off flights. not torture the innocent with no access to bathrooms etc.

  • Todd

    The TSA security directive only applies to inbound international flights and expires on Wednesday.

    A different story than “OMG! No iPods! WTF?”

  • anonymous

    Will the TSA arrest you for urinating on your seat in that last hour if you really have to go but aren’t allowed?

    Why is this Mac related other than the fact that you drew your own connection to iPods and MacBooks? Are they saying that Zunes and Dells aren’t banned as well?

  • IcyFog

    Just means I’m driving more.
    TSA is punishing the victims instead of the criminal. I guess that’s what we get for living in a political correct society.

  • Fin Devious

    Ban all Muslims from flying. Problem solved.

  • Joe Public

    This is nothing to do with security.

    It’s just a ploy by the AGW hypothesizors to deter travel & so reduce the Carbon Footprint.

  • thanx_al

    “Are they saying that Zunes … aren’t banned as well?”

    Why would they need to ban something no one has ever seen in the wild?

  • thebanite

    Not once in the U.S. have I heard that the directive expires Wednesday. However, I am inclined to believe it. I have found that for newsworthy items the near to real-time flow of information on the web is sometimes a full day ahead of the news outlets. Perhaps paying attention to it will help the TSA grasp the foolishness of their efforts? Less than 1% of passengers get tagged as no-fly–could it be the threat of terrorism is truly that minimal? I think so. Let’s have more articles that stretch Mac relevance–it is more relevant than a terror attack here. Even Bush II can’t recall accurately the last attack on us here. He thinks it was in 2002–and what he recalled turned out not to be an attack at all. We’re overly scared of a minor threat.

  • Daniel

    Islamists prefer to use Droids when blowing up stuff, and blowing up people. At least no one cries when droids (or those hideous ugly erises) are blown up.

  • Um no

    FWIW I flew from Hong Kong to SFO today and other than a pat-down before boarding in Hong Kong, I experienced none of the nonsense people have been whining about since the Christmas Day pants-on-fire incident. I was not restricted to my seat for the last hour, nor was I prohibited from using electronics or from having anything in my lap.

  • Brian

    we are leading to an era were Americans will not be allowed nothing in defense of Americans.
    And I start thinking, those stupid laws are really intent to defend Americans or to turn us into stupid robots with no rights?
    Do you remember when they wanted to come up with a law restricting pedestrians to use ipods?
    I seriously start thinking that all “they” want is to turn people into stupid machines with no rights to expression.
    These restrictions are ridiculous and we should think about not accepting everything the government imposes, soon we wont be allowed to talk with passengers! Seriously, its coming… I think we gotta do something here.
    I think we need a law to protect our freedom first and then to protect ourselves. Without freedom I am better of dead anyways.
    I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and its really getting serious now…

  • footagehead

    The new “Great Balls of Fire” trick …
    The sad , no pitiful part of this story, is that passengers will
    be the victims of the lack of coordination of those who are supposed to protect us.
    I can’t believe I heard a ‘supposed security expert’ say there is a
    “huge 500,000′ person low level watch list, before someone moves up to the ‘no fly’ watch list. Thus, if Facebook has 300,000 million
    people, it seems easier to find these guys using Facebook !