Law enforcement officials in the United Kingdom have arrested two dozen people suspected of plotting to blow up commercial passenger jets flying from London to the United States. The plot is said to have involved sneaking liquid explosives onto planes. It isn’t clear whether all the conspirators have been captured and the plot entirely foiled. The Transportation Security Administration weighed in immediately with new rules about what passengers departing from airports in the United States may and may not bring in their carry-on luggage. The rules are so new, and were apparently assembled in such haste, that not even TSA seems very clear about what they are. The FAQ reprinted below, copied on Aug. 10 from the TSA Web site, raises nearly as many questions as it answers. The FAQ has since been redesigned (click here to see it), with one feature that allows readers to request updates and another that invites readers to vote on how responsive a particular answer is. (Making the answers responsive in the first place either wasn’t possible or never occurred to the people who prepared the FAQ.) The text, though rearranged, remains essentially the same.
To read the footnotes on the document below, roll your mouse over the passages highlighted in yellow.
Do you have a Hot Document? If so, please alert me at documents@slate.com. Please indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous.
