How the TSA videos went viral

The Transportation and Security Administration has been a hot topic in the past month, and today a top trending video is footage captured at an Oklahoma City airport of wheel-chair bound Tammy Banovac who stripped to her underwear to avoid a search. That clip, which you can view directly below, has been viewed over a million times in the past day.



Over the past month there are a handful of TSA related videos that have "gone viral".



The holiday season is still young, and we're still a few weeks off from the next surge in domestic air travel, but the height of TSA hysteria might be behind us for now. Looking at data for users searching "TSA" on YouTube, you can see on the graph below that search interest peaked on the 22nd, the busiest travel day of the year and the day that two of the most-viewed videos received the most media attention.

Searches first began to pick up after John Tyner posted the video above of his experience at the San Diego Airport.



Two other interesting asides about the search data:
1. The largest spiking search term associated with "TSA" in the past 30 days was "pat down."
2. The state "TSA" searches were most popular in? Utah. (The video of the young boy being searched was captured in Salt Lake City.)