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Privacy Advocate Jacob Appelbaum Reports Break-In Of Berlin Apartment
Jacob Appelbaum isn't shy about his role as a pro-privacy (and anti-secrecy) activist and hacker. A long-time contributor to the Tor project, and security researcher more generally, Appelbaum stood in for the strategically absent Julian Assange at HOPE in 2010, and more recently delivered Edward Snowden's acceptance speech when Snowden was awarded the Government Accountability Project's Whistleblower Prize. Now, he reports, his Berlin apartment appears to have been burglarized, and his computers tampered with. As reported by Deutsche Welle, "Appelbaum told [newspaper the Berliner Zeitung] that somebody had broken into his apartment and used his computer in his absence. 'When I flew away for an appointment, I installed four alarm systems in my apartment,' Appelbaum told the paper after discussing other situations which he said made him feel uneasy. 'When I returned, three of them had been turned off. The fourth, however, had registered that somebody was in my flat - although I'm the only one with a key. And some of my effects, whose positions I carefully note, were indeed askew. My computers had been turned on and off.'" It's not the first time by any means that Appelbaum's technical and political pursuits have drawn attention of the unpleasant variety.
It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.
Seriously, if you don't want the American secret police to dig around through your shit, kidnap, torture, and possibly kill you (while making your body disappear), don't piss off anyone in the American government.
I'm not being sarcastic.
Come on, he installed four alarm system and didn't bother with a single surveillance camera? I am not saying that there wasn't somebody in his apartment, but it's hard not to think this might have just been a case of a malfunctioning alarm system and a whole bunch of paranoia on top. If the government is after you, at least make sure you get some pretty pictures of them, cams are cheap these days.
You can't overlook the possibility that they were leaving a message, whoever it was.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It's surprising that there are still some people in the USA who are surprised that your spooks are generally perceived, all over the world, to be criminals.
It is surprising that some people are unable to conceive of the idea that many nations would like to get their hands on the information that Snowden took, and which Appelbaum has access to. For all you know it could be Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Germans, French, Israelis, Swedes, or just about any other country's agents. That is before you consider criminal gangs or hacker groups. Your imagination is far too limited to consider the range of possibilities.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
So someone managed to turn off three alarm systems, but didn't think to make sure that the contents of the apartment were all left in the same position that they found them?
Only if your aim was to hide the fact that you were ever there.
And then go over the EFI boot partition, and find some way to compare the firmware with the file from the manufacturer's site. If they have been compromised, don't pass up the chance to document exactly how it was done.
None of your hardware can be trusted any longer, your apartment is bugged, and man do I feel for you having to clean it up.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I'd swap out the keyboards as well. Just sayin'
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
My desktop computer moves when I make hardware changes. The dust is medium and consistent. Someone moving the computer to clone a drive or plug something in the back will make it so I can tell, unless they can also clean it and age the dust 8 months. You don't have to be OCD to notice changes. It just helps.
Learn to love Alaska
Sure, there are probably some surveillance things tossed in mainly "to be found", but the fact is that a break-in like this - where 3/4 of the systems weren't even turned back on is either a) laughably amateur, or b)(more likely) a deliberate message TELLING him he's under surveillance.
If he's practicing even moderately good security measures, he's likely beyond all but governments' ability to crack. And if they're after him, there are few things that he could do to PREVENT such surveillance.
-Styopa
So someone managed to turn off three alarm systems, but didn't think to make sure that the contents of the apartment were all left in the same position that they found them?
They might have had no alternative but to turn off the three alarms. After all a loud ringing alarm will soon bring investigators of one sort or another.
Who knows just how persnickety his staged positioning of items in the room might have been. That magazine might overlap that envelope on the table "just so", and he could have had photos on his smartphone that he could match better than even a professional team could restore.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Your web browser will download anything from anywhere the pages you visit tell them to. Even if you browse only encrypted sites the site itself can be trivially exploited via XSS, SQL injection, or the zero-day exploits purchasable on the black market. Now, some of the pages you've been browsing can contain hidden <iframe> tags or if JS is enabled XMLHTTP Requests to download child porn. You'll never see the images, but there it is: an ISP record that your computer regularly made requests to child porn sites and downloaded kiddie porn. The spy agencies can simply put CP on your systems remotely, and give them "probable cause" to search. A physical copy would be quite a nice touch.
This isn't a hypothetical warning. I clean up servers linking to CP about 3 times a year. The government doesn't even have to do anything but make possession of certain strings of 1's and 0's illegal. Then the angsty teen skiddies with a copy of Metasploit inject the illegal pictures to ordinary sites in protest that sexting pics of themselves is illegal. Now, your Internet history clears after a period of time, so if it's not in there right now, it could have been and probably still resides on your drive's free sectors. You should be using whole drive encryption for this reason alone -- Although that doesn't rid the ISP record of your apparent obsession with disgusting perverse illegal imagery.
A police state has two prime tools:
0. Ensure it's impossible to obey every law.
1. Selective enforcement of the law.