I've never understood the laptop obsession in the first place. Yes, they use electricity and batteries, but I don't see why security agencies are so fascinated by them.

Last week at Ben Gurion Airport, they even have a special laptop scanning box, specifically so that the laptop is open when it passes through a CTX scanner. (My laptop didn't interest them, so I didn't get to watch this up close).

I see this deriving from several sources:

1. Pan Am 103. The radio that blew up that plane worked, a "sniffer" might not have caught it, and it was a much bigger chassis than a laptop. There were many other complicating factors about Lockerbie.

2. The movies

3. A holdover from an era when laptops were larger, had more moving parts, and were less common.