THERE WAS A talk at the last Defcon and the TSA came up. Paraphrased, the message was that Kip Hawley, the TSA Administrator wondered why it is hated so much. It answered its own question this week with a ban on lithium batteries.

The situation goes like this, someone at TSA hears something, and it overreacts. This is not a problem, that is what it is paid to do, and if there is a threat that has an unknown aspect to it, better safe than sorry. God forbid if the voters aren't afraid, they might question the real problems that the government is not addressing, I mean, they might not behave properly. In general, overreaction is better than underreaction.

The problem is that the TSA never gets out of overreaction mode. Remember the whole 'liquid explosives' thing a year and a half ago? I think it was right for the government to overreact, and overreact it did. A week or three later, it came up with the whole 311 nonsense presumably to keep people from being too annoyed to realise that there was no liquid explosives terror threat in the first place.

What is the problem? A year and a half later we are still going over the security theater bulls*it, something that did no good then, and does no good now, other than to confiscate piles of liquids that no one seems to know where it ends up..

What do we mean? Let's say that you want to blow up a plane, and the TSA has limited you to one litre of liquids in 3oz or less containers. For argument's sake, lets assume you can pack .5l of liquid in each baggie, which is code for the TSA concluding that it takes more than .5l of the stuff to take down an airliner, presuming it can be made into something nefarious in the first place.

The problem, and it is a showstopper, is that they are only preventing you from taking that through security, not on to a plane. You can bring a 55 gallon drum through security if you can convince a high school dropout that it will fit in the overhead compartment, and that it is empty.

Once through security, you can fill it up with anything you want, and then walk it on to the plane. I have brought 2l bottles filled with water on to the plane, and you can get an assortment of jugs and bottles at many of the over priced shops in the concourse.

So, if you are an international organisation bent on abject stupidity with things that go boom, all you need to do is bring 10 people through security with .5l each, and have them hand the daintily packed liquids to a single miscreant. You can do this in full view of security, legally, and then pour it into a commemorative jug for the local sports team.

The liquid ban is past pointlessness, past stupidity, past absurd, and well into folly. It is useless, expensive, annoying, and makes people hate the TSA, an organization that does a relatively good job, shoe jihad aside. It had a point for two weeks but is in effects for 18 or so months, and like an old fish, it is past its shelf life. Common sense would ..... oh never mind.

That brings us back to batteries, and their ban. Ostensibly it is there to protect against fires, I don't think anyone is dumb enough to think that an exploding laptop will punch through a titanium hull when it barely breaks a cheap plastic notebook shell.

Any person who tries this is going to have a lot of time to recover from singed pride in a maximum security jail. So, the idea is to stop fires, fair enough.

If you know anything about lithium batteries, they go boom, or at least go sizzle, when one of two things happen, they are being charged or discharged, and something goes wrong. Most have protection mechanisms to slow down the reaction or shut it off if things get too hot. The Sony batteries at the heart of the Dell fiasco had metal flakes in them that shorted internally causing a rapid discharge, heat and fire.

Under normal circumstances, you can't get a battery that hot. Wrap it in insulation and charge it, overcharge it, hit it with a hammer to cause an internal short, or otherwise discharge it rapidly, and you have an potential problem. That sort of problem is a severe hazard if it happens in the cargo hold of an airplane over the Pacific Ocean.

Which again brings us back to the TSA and its baggie fetish. Look at the rules for carrying batteries on here and here. They are full of common sense tips to keep batteries from blowing up, something we know happens several times a day by the sheer number of airliners dropping out of the sky in flames. Fair enough.

The problem is that the best thing it can recommend is to tape down the off switch of things that are checked in, which to police means opening and inspecting every bag by hand. Let me be the first to say it ain't gonna happen in this lifetime. Given the number of cell phones that go off overhead every time a plane I am on comes in for landing, I can pretty much guarantee this law will be as fastidiously abided by as speed limits on rural roads and jaywalking between the hours of 2 and 4am.

The checked in bags, the problematic ones, are not going to be policed, and if a laptop powers up in flight, I can guarantee it will overheat. It may not go boom, but it will overheat. And these new laws do just about zero to fix that problem, if it is a problem. Given the current death toll from lithium battery fires on airplanes, currently at zero thousand this year alone, I will confidently get on a plane and not worry if this law gets repealed.

So, what has the TSA accomplished? It is going to make business travellers jump through hoops, make computers an untenable option on long trans-oceanic flights, and generally lengthen the already miserable queues at airports.

I guarantee no one will feel any safer because of this, just like no one I know of feels any safer about not being able to bring a can of Coke, or heaven forbid zit cream, on a flight. It will make everyone going through an airport more miserable, and can your grandmother prove how much lithium is in her pacemaker battery?

In the end, the TSA probably meant well, and I will give it the benefit of the doubt by saying that it may even have had a reason to do this in the first place. Actually making it permanent however only does what the shoe jihad and the war against moisture did, make us angry.

The saddest part is that the TSA needs the cooperation of the people, or at least it claims to when it asks us to be vigilant. It is hard to be vigilant and take this seriously when the only things that you see it do are patently absurd and annoying. This battery ban only moves things in the wrong direction, and that is the saddest part.µ