Imagine: the head of the Transportation Security Administration gets so green with envy over the Edward Snowden revelations that he issues a new security rule – every airline passenger's cellphone must get powered up and toyed with by screeners at the end of the security line, all the better to keep up with the NSA.

This was a fictional scenario I actually came up with a little over a year ago – the absurd premise of a satirical post on my blog. The Onion-style humor, replete with James Clapper jokes. Except I knew a checkpoint power-up directive was not at all outside the realm of airport-security possibility, because I was a TSA agent for six years – and the TSA can be as reactionary and absurd as it is technologically inept.

So it came as no surprise to me when the TSA announced on Sunday that flyers heading to the US from overseas will now be required to switch on their mobile phones and other electronic devices at checkpoints. And it should come as no surprise to you when this new measure joins the never-ending parade of blanket security directives that may actually make us less safe.

Forget for a moment the practical questions: What if you forget your phone charger? No dice. What about the inattentive x-ray operators who break your laptop, rendering it unable to boot up? I saw about one computer drop per day, per checkpoint, when I was at Chicago's O'Hare International – so that's, oh, at least 10 potentially confiscated laptops every 24 hours at a major airport. Sorry.

This is the real conundrum that accompanies most post-9/11 airport security rules: the logic behind them is a race to the bottom. Consider...

If a group of terrorists is clever enough to pack explosives inside a laptop to make them undetectable by current technology, wouldn't they be clever enough to devise an explosive laptop that can do all of this ... and still appear to power up?

If US intelligence next announces that terrorists have become clever enough to engineer the faux-power laptop bomb, and passengers are then required to prove their laptops can connect to airport WiFi, how long until murky intelligence warns of a hotspot-enabled iBomb ?



If terrorists are theoretically clever enough to make that smart of a bomb, what would stop them from building one in, say, a disabled extremist's motorized wheelchair, Breaking Bad-style?

smart of a bomb, what would stop them from building one in, say, a disabled extremist's motorized wheelchair, Breaking Bad-style? Also, and not to get too deep into the mind of Machiavellian murderers, but wouldn't they have just done that from the beginning?

I was a long-time airport security screener – the guy who dutifully swabbed your daughter's Xbox in search of C-4 and threw away your son's verboten snow globe at Christmastime under the watchful eye of a micromanaging TSA manager. And I can tell you how the cellphone power-up rule, like all such TSA directives, would probably work:

Nearly all of the security workforce, in all likelihood, will be mindlessly waving through passengers with powered-up electronics – because when you work front-line security with an inflexible checklist as your guide, you find it's easy to let critical thinking take a backseat to basic standard operating procedure compliance. Meanwhile, at least one old lady will probably arrive at every airport checkpoint each day having forgotten to charge her beat-up old flip-phone, which an agent will inevitably toss into the checkpoint trash bin.

That's because absurd, ham-handed security rules are ceaselessly drilled into the minds of TSA screeners as the only way to ensure the American way of life. I'm sure that varies at international airports, but there's nothing good about fostering complacency that allows for screeners to thoughtlessly regard as "safe" all items that fall within a rigid set of security parameters. It makes security lines longer, and long security lines make for juicy terrorist targets. We remove our shoes to ward off another shoe bomber, as we stand in an ever-growing queue, vulnerable to the prospect of a shoe-box bomber.

So, how should a rational security system deal with "recent and relevant information" about the "devilish technical skill of those terrorists who design ever more sophisticated means of concealing explosives"? Simple: announce to the public (and would-be iBombers) that all carry-on electronics will be subject to enhanced scrutiny, contingent upon case-by-case analysis, as well as the occasional random search.

If I were a really bad person considering doing an even worse thing with a laptop or cellphone and I heard that, I would instantly toss my iBomb out the window – perhaps literally, aiming for a crowded street instead of an airplane. In a global airport security network that is realistic as opposed to absurdist, a passenger's laptop would only occasionally be put to a power-up test, and Grandma's phone, in most cases, would receive exactly the theatrical attention it deserves: none.