On Tuesday the US Department for Homeland Security announced it was banning electronic devices larger than smartphones from cabin baggage on inbound flights from 10 Middle Eastern and North African airports.
The UK has just followed suit. All inbound, direct flights to the UK from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia are expected to be affected, with effect from Saturday.
The inconvenience and risk of theft of expensive electronic items such as laptops, tablets, Kindles and games consoles has clearly been eclipsed, in the minds of security services, by the perceived terror threat.
A laptop-activated bomb was detonated on a domestic flight in Somalia last year, with the terrorist expelled through a hole created in the fuselage. No other passengers were harmed and the plane, which had not yet reached cruising altitude, was safely landed.
Although that incident was cited by US officials as they announced the laptop ban, Philip Baum, editor of Aviation Security International magazine, told the Independent that “the laptop used to bomb the Daallo Airlines flight from Mogadishu to Djibouti was handed to the passenger after the security checkpoint.”
Pointless ‘security theatre’
Baum is unconvinced that the ban was necessary. “If we cannot, in 2017, distinguish between a laptop that contains an IED and one that does not, then our screening process is completely flawed. And encouraging people to check laptops, and other such items, into the luggage hold simply makes the challenge even harder.”
Shashank Joshi, senior research fellow at security think tank the Royal United Services Institute was even more forthright: “This risks being seen as a form of pointless ‘security theatre’ which causes great disruption with little benefit to aviation security.”
It’s not even certain that terrorists are more likely to get a bomb through carry-on screening than into the cargo hold. Some experts even believe that screening for hand luggage is the more stringent of the two at many airports.
The bomb that brought down a Russian airliner flying from Sharm el-Sheikh International Airport in Egypt in October 2015, killing all 224 people on board, was in the cargo hold, not the cabin.
Paul Cruickshank, terrorism expert and editor of the CTC Sentinel, noted that “Abu Dhabi and Dubai have been selected for this, and they’re among the most modern airports in the world. They have all the state-of-the-art machines US airports have.”
Cruickshank, who was speaking to CNN, also questioned the timing of the move.
“This is not new that terrorist groups have been developing capabilities to conceal explosives in electronics,” he continued. “So why all of a sudden are we getting these new restrictions?”
“Incontrovertible intelligence”
Although Department of Homeland Security did not cite a specific threat, Con Coughlin was inclined to give the security services the benefit of the doubt in the Telegraph. “The Government’s ban on passengers carrying electronic devices onto aircraft travelling to destinations in the Middle East and North Africa will cause immense inconvenience for hundreds of thousands of passengers, not least businessmen who use long-haul flights to catch up on valuable office work.
“It will also come as a great irritation for families hoping to keep their children occupied for lengthy periods by playing computer games and watching downloads of their favourite programmes.
“So it is fair to assume these draconian measures would not have been implemented in the first place unless Whitehall had incontrovertible intelligence that terrorists were planning to use laptops and other electronic devices to smuggle explosives into the passenger cabins of commercial airliners.”
Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, noted that the Department of Homeland Security had not indicated that fresh intelligence had prompted the move.
“The administration hasn’t provided a security rationale that makes sense for this measure targeting travelers from Muslim-majority countries,” she said. “Given the administration’s already poor track record, this measure sends another signal of discriminatory targeting.”
John Pistole, the head of the Transportation Security Administration under the Obama administration, sympathised with the officials making such difficult decisions.
“There’s no perfect system,” he said. “You just try to mitigate risk the best you can.
“You can only mitigate the risk, not eliminate it. To eliminate it, you have to shut the system down, and then the terrorists win. Instituting a system-wide ban, that would be hugely disruptive.”
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