US pledges to act on airline threat after student boasts of security breach

THE Bush administration pledged yesterday to move more aggressively against potential threats in the wake of an incident in which federal authorities said a young man boasted about successfully compromising airline security.

From now on, a Transportation Security Administration official said, the agency will single out for response any threatening communication and will seek to better train its employees on how to recognise such messages.

“The system should have picked it up. If this highlights a flaw in the system, it could be relatively easily corrected,” TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield said.