Hypothetical scenario of securing your laptop against a state-level actor. What are all the steps you would take? Is something like FileVault on OSX enough? Would you feel confident in your ability to keep your data private against such an adversary? Is it even possible?
Ask HN: How would you secure your laptop against the NSA?
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Re: Ask HN: How would you secure your laptop against the NSA?
#2How valuable is the information on your laptop to the NSA? If it's under $100k you're probably ok doing what Stallman does https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html . If you have information worth over $5M to the NSA, then you better get physical security personnel as well as network and hardware security personnel; maybe ally yourself with a different powerful state or corporate actor. In other words you need to make their expected cost of getting that information significantly higher than it's worth.
Re: Ask HN: How would you secure your laptop against the NSA?
#3Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/
Re: Ask HN: How would you secure your laptop against the NSA?
#4Physical security is the primary concern.
If access to data "after the fact" is what you're really asking, then you use the strongest encryption possible (a few options), and have a deadman switch to physically destroy the hardware (e.g., melt the platters/chips) including any caching mechanism(s) that's off-drive.
Re: Ask HN: How would you secure your laptop against the NSA?
#5If a state level actor really wants the data in your laptop in a targeted manner, there's very little you can do. For starters, if that were really your situation, you wouldn't use OSX or Windows :-)
If your objective is instead to prevent data theft by identity thieves or commercial spies, the FileVault type precautions and standard security practices are probably good enough.
Re: Ask HN: How would you secure your laptop against the NSA?
#6I've never been worried about a National Security kind of interest in my affairs, but if you are here is a humorous and relevant blog post on Schneier's blog: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/mickens_on_se...
Re: Ask HN: How would you secure your laptop against the NSA?
#7Remove hard drive send via UPS, or private courier.
If that is insufficient it's not a fight over security. It's a fight about mobilization of lawyers and political contacts.
Re: Ask HN: How would you secure your laptop against the NSA?
#8I'd just smash my laptop with a hammer, microwave the HDD, and go live a simple life on a mountain somewhere raising alpacas.
Re: Ask HN: How would you secure your laptop against the NSA?
#9I'd just smash my laptop with a hammer, microwave the HDD, and go live a simple life on a mountain somewhere raising alpacas.
I've seriously considered doing this before, but I would be bored out of my mind without any intellectual stimulation.
Re: Ask HN: How would you secure your laptop against the NSA?
#10The first step is buying the right laptop. In this day and age, even hardware can have backdoors. You'd want something devoid of such backdoors (or the potential thereof, which tends to put a dependency on open hardware) and fully compatible with open software (not necessarily free, but it tends to help) all the way down to the firmware.
Transparency is a dependency of trust. If any component lacks transparency, then it cannot be trusted. Period.
This means neither macOS nor FileVault are sufficient; neither are transparent, and therefore neither are trustworthy. Even a fully-free operating system like a Linux distro or OpenBSD is insufficient if you rely on closed-source drivers or firmware.
Next step is to detect tampering. This means that your laptop needs to prevent booting any operating system unless you've signed it with some private key, and needs to clear any full-disk encryption keys if any attempt is made at physical tampering. This is also the step where you ensure the physical security of that machine.
Once you've established physical security and full-stack transparency, you can start worrying about the encryption itself (which will need to be much stronger than the norm) and about sandboxing untrustworthy software.
Really, the only perfectly-secure computer is an incinerated computer. The best anyone can do is minimize the opportunities for such a state-level actor to, well, act. Transparency, tamper-resistance, cryptography, and isolation are the keys, and even the slightest error or concession for "convenience" can and will permit the likes of the NSA to actually infiltrate your systems.