TSA Announces ASAC Public Meeting – 12-7-21

Today, the TSA published a public meeting notice in the Federal Register (86 FR 62837) for the Aviation Security Advisory Committee (ASAC). The public meeting will be held virtually on December 12^th, 2021.

The meeting will include a legislative update as well as briefings by Subcommittees and working groups on the following topics:

• Air Cargo,

• Airlines,

• Airports,

• General Aviation,

• Insider Threat,

• International Aviation, and

• Security Technology

Commentary

It is interesting that the ASAC is not (and apparently has not) considering cybersecurity, and more importantly cybersecurity incident reporting. While the last two ASAC meetings have been closed, it seems unlikely that they considered the TSA’s announced plans to extend the pipeline security directive number 1 requirements for appointing a cybersecurity point of contact and cyber incident reporting to the airline transportation sector. SD01 was not classified and there would be no point for such an airline directive to be classified either. Even so, if the ASAC had been asked to consider such a requirement, I would have expected that a report would be forthcoming at the upcoming meeting. It is, after all, the ASAC’s tasking to provide industry input to the TSA regulatory decision making process. And the TSA would certainly want that input; Right?