Checking your electronics is as risky as it is inconvenient. Here’s how to stay secure.

Computing on the road may be about to get more complicated, expensive, and risky. For this you can thank people who want to blow airplanes out of the sky — and US officials who see genuine danger and/or an opportunity to engage in “just shut up and do as you’re told” security theater.

But when people like Homeland Security head John Kelly sound ready to drastically restrict travelers’ use of electronics in plane cabins — expanding a limited ban that’s already in place — we need to move into planning mode, not just worrying mode. If you’re among those who travel with a laptop, tablet, or digital camera, get ready for a huge mess.

I’m not going to get into the ban’s logic, or lack of it. As always, we’re not being told what specific threat (if any) the government is responding to — though if history is any lesson, officials prefer to overreact than take the chance that they will be blamed for something that goes wrong later on. Security theater has been the rule since 2001, with occasional positive tweaks but not enough real change.

So what should you do in the event of wider ban on cabin electronics? I asked some security experts for advice. “There is no good advice,” says one of them, Bruce Schneier. “It’s just crazy. Truly crazy.”

But some options for travelers may a bit less bad than others.

Let’s start, first, with the assumption that the government won’t impose an outright ban of laptops and larger electronics on all flights — in carry-ons and checked luggage — to and from the United States. (If it did, the ban would almost certainly be extended to all domestic flights, as well.) That would be a recipe for havoc on an epic scale. So as long as electronics can still be stowed in checked luggage, which is more than bad enough, the priority will be to discourage tampering and mitigate the risks associated with theft.

For people who carry sensitive information — business or personal — allowing electronics out of their control is simply a non-starter. Many business people, security-minded journalists, and political activists, among others, don’t leave their devices to the mercy of third parties.

Yet many of us do leave data in the hands of trusted (more than not) third parties, and that’s going to be one of the expanding workarounds in our no-can-carry world. That is, we can travel with bare-bones operating system setups, with as little personal or business data as possible (preferably none at all) on the laptop’s internal disk drive. When we arrive and get back online, we can work mostly in browsers and retrieve what we need from cloud storage for the specific applications that have to run “locally” on the PC.