A good read. Not that old and I think it still has valuable points in the age of surveillance. You don't have to be a criminal to make use of it.

Edit: Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30788530

Don't buy a laptop second hand. I live in the UK, went to the USA with a second hand laptop from cash converters (a pawn shop in the UK) and got stopped at the airport on investigation. Requesting to hand over laptop and password. I was 19 and naive.

When I was 15, I had discovered a windows 98 DCOM and supposedly according to my secondary school "severely hacked the school". All I had discovered was how to reveal the C drive. I too had used the schools news paper account to access a student's course work, who had been bullying me and I sabotaged his work.

My rookie mistake was that I had copied his work to the public folder, made changes in my own school account and then updated it back via the school zone news paper account.

I was banned from doing my IT GCSE and got the nickname Hacker Kid. I got no secondary school IT qualification and colleges wouldn't accept me apart from one offering a BTEC because the lecturer gave me a chance of "you wouldn't do this again?"

My father had worked for a Isreal company, which was linked to Mossad and the Isreal government. Our phone lines had been tapped when installation broadband engineer noticed there was a strange device he had never seen on our copper wire from the exchange cabinet and was curious to know if it was "office related". My father used to WFH on an odd occasion and we had an ISDN line. Sweet sweet 128k in the days of 56k. 32ms on Quake 3 arena.

What I believe is that they had dug in to my school records and because this was the first time I been to the USA (2017) and my online friend in California whose parents had worked for the US government, which was where I was staying put me on monitoring. Tied with my father's records having governmental contacts with Isreal. Yahoo Messenger was a fun time.

I surrendered the laptop without encryption and they offered to return it during the week. I got it returned to my friends parents house and was advised by someone in a tech club thing to trash it before I left the USA. That was a hard one to explain to my parents arriving back home without a laptop they had bought. No pocket money for me for at least six months but at least I got laid on that trip.

Paranoia is a curse but keep it under control it keeps you sane. I have my own theories that KDE, Linux and FreeBSD are all tapped. It's known that Intel ME is. FreeBSD is my daily driver OS but now I'm conflicted to where I am looking at alternatives but that may just be paranoia. Who has really audited all of the kernel source? We take it for granted it isn't.

I've been skeptical ever since but my second thoughts do ride by that microprocessors since the 1980's are tapped.