The Muslim laptop ban

You must already know the story. The United States has barred passengers from bringing their laptops and iPads on board flights from eight Muslim-majority countries. Britain didn't wait too long to join the ban. As a result, the so-called "Muslim laptop ban" has become the hottest topic in Turkey.

There seems to be three aspects to this restriction. The first is apparently counter-terrorism. According to CNN, U.S. Special Forces collected vital intelligence during a raid in Yemen last January, exposing the growing capability of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to target aviation. Hence from now on, terrorists seem to be bent on terrorizing not only the earth, but also the sky. What they basically do to this end is to take out the battery in the laptop and replace it with explosives.

The latest example of such a bomb attack happened in February 2016 when an explosive device hidden inside a laptop exploded on a plane flying from Mogadishu to Djibouti. Al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda's branch in Somalia, claimed responsibility.

What makes this problem worse is that the X-ray and similar scanners at airports are not advanced enough to detect some sophisticated explosives. For example, a Russian passenger plane flying from Egypt to Russia in October 2015 exploded due to a bomb in a laptop (the first attack of this kind); it was later discovered that the explosive was not identified by the X-ray.

Laptops are prone to another security risk as well. When they get connected to Wi-Fi within the airplane, they have the potential to hack the control system of the aircraft and seize control of it using what is called the "air gap."

Facing this new restriction, many people question whether cell phones don't cause the...