BY JANUS KOPFSTEIN AND JACOB STEINBLATT
Security experts and international travelers are confused and angry after the U.S. Transportation Security Administration imposed a discriminatory ban on some personal electronic devices, which targets flights to the U.S. on airlines from at least eight Muslim-majority countries.
The Trump administration quietly rolled out the ban early in the morning on Tuesday, directing ten foreign airlines to have customers stow their laptops, iPads, e-readers, and other large personal devices in their checked luggage on US-bound flights — but notably, not smartphones. The affected airlines include Royal Jordanian, which originally broke word of the ban when it tweeted a travel advisory to customers, as well as U.S.-bound flights from select airports in Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates.
The reasoning behind the policy is unclear, especially given the government’s vague definition of which devices should be prevented from entering the passenger cabin. Officials have told reporters that the action is meant to address “gaps” in foreign airport security, but did not cite any specific or credible threat.
“Evaluated intelligence indicates that terrorist groups continue to target commercial aviation and are aggressively pursuing innovative methods to undertake their attacks, to include smuggling explosive devices in various consumer items,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote in a “fact sheet” sent to reporters on Tuesday.
The document does not specifically define what size or type of device is allowed, and offers only extremely vague answers to questions about the ban. In response to the question of why only these specific countries and airports were selected, the DHS would only say that the decision was “based on the current threat picture.”
Some security experts contacted by Vocativ speculated that the ban may apply only to larger devices like laptops because it’s easier to hide explosives inside them. But this also doesn’t make sense, they said, given the inclusion of tablets and Apple-made devices like iPads, which are notoriously difficult to disassemble and have virtually no room inside to carry anything that could be used for an improvised explosive.
Many also questioned the wisdom of having airline customers put so many devices with lithium-ion batteries together in the plane’s cargo hold, rather than in the passenger cabin.
“Seems as well planned as the Travel Ban,” one pilot mused on PPRuNe, a popular online pilots’ forum. “Would be curious to see the risk analysis done when you will potentially now have hundreds of [Lithium] batteries in the cargo holds of each and every flight against the chances of an errant terrorist evading security and successfully detonating a laptop bomb.”
“I certainly would not want to fly with that many lithium batteries checked-in and bouncing around, likely not secured well,” wrote another user of FlyerTalk, a large online air traveler’s forum.
For many, the specific targeting of airlines from Muslim-majority countries evoked strong parallels with the Trump administration’s discriminatory travel ban, whose original version paralyzed airports and left travelers in limbo after blocking visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries. Both that order and a slightly updated version have been temporarily blocked by courts in Hawaii and Washington state, which ruled that they may violate the Constitution.
“Like so much today, this is poorly thought out, from the terrible rollout that adds to confusion to the clearly disproven assumption that only people from certain countries are terrorists,” Peter W. Singer, a national security strategist and senior fellow at the New America Institute, told Vocativ. “Indeed, even for proven cases, it fails the logic test. Based on its logic, we should only ban all British passengers from wearing shoes and only Nigerian passengers from wearing underwear, because of the nationality of the shoe bomber (Richard Reid) and the underwear bomber (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab).”
The U.K. government is also reportedly planning to announce a similar policy banning laptops from inbound flights originating from certain countries. The BBC reports that the ban is “part of [a] coordinated action with the U.S.”
