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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.
Common tactic of the German Stasi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Zersetzung
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
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."
By the sound of it, he's doing a lot of things right. Read his bio. I'm very glad and thankful there are still brave men left.
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.
I use the same excuse as a reason not cleaning my apartment.
Be seeing you...
He has pictures. https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/394042003928776704
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.