New U.S. Law Effective Jan 1 Prohibits Lithium Batteries In Checked Luggage

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I like to carry extra laptop and cell phone batteries with me when I travel for more than a couple of days at a time, especially if going outside the country. I fried a cell phone once using a faulty outlet converter overseas, so now I like to play it safer by depending upon extra batteries. It was fairly simple to pack the extra batteries into my checked luggage. It was a good simple way to have a backup power source while travelling.

Well, as of next Tuesday that simplicity is no more.

Effective January 1, 2008, all U.S. air travelers will be required to keep all their spare lithium batteries in carry on baggage, with the terminals covered, as a precaution against the possibility of the batteries exploding.

It appears the batteries in laptops have exploded before, and the Department of Homeland Security is afraid of the possibilities of terrorists using the batteries as explosives.

For more details, see the Department of Transportation's Safe Travel Web site.

Check your corporate travel policies and information security policies. You will likely need to make an update, along with providing some awareness communications, to ensure your business travelers are in compliance with this new law and are not surprised when checking in at the airport!

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

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