Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

The obvious explanation here is that the USPS fucked up. As the tweet says, you'd think the NSA program would be more subtle. Further, there isn't much in the way of intelligence presence in Alexandria. So what's more likely: that the NSA does this program in a secret location that's still right next to all the non-secret stuff, and they can't cover up the tracking data, or that the USPS accidentally sent a package to the wrong place?

Edit: I want to emphasize how incredibly stupid the article is when analyzing the tracking data. Key quote:

"From Dulles, it moved another four times around the military and intelligence belt in suburban Washington DC, finally landing in Alexandria at 11:03 am on January 23."

First of all, there is nothing significant to Dulles. It's the largest airport in the area, and this makes it the arrival point for any packages coming in by air. 90% of my packages have a "Dulles, VA" tracking entry on them by the time they get to me.

Second, it didn't move "four times". It went from Dulles to a carrier facility in Alexandria, then it went out for delivery and got delivered. That's two moves. And how many times do you expect it to move? That's how air-based package delivery works. It goes to an airport. Then it goes to a local sorting facility. Then it goes out for delivery.

Third, the phrase "military and intelligence belt" is ridiculous. Especially so when the only two locations involved are Dulles and Alexandria, neither of which has much in the way of either military nor intelligence.

The article tries way too hard to make its case, and uses a great deal of purple prose to state what comes down to, "the package got delivered to Alexandria, VA which is close to a lot of government agencies". That would actually be more convincing than the insanity they wrote, although still not very convincing. But at least it would be honest.

The sad sad thing is, though, that in the '90s we made these jokes about surveillance cameras, internet taps, government-written-viruses, etc..etc...

Seemed funny then, too.

Not all malware can be removed the way you remove that antivirus demo. From the Der Spiegel article[1]:

> Take, for example, when they intercept shipping deliveries. If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops. The NSA calls this method interdiction. At these so-called "load stations," agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.

Naturally, if they also load a keyboard logger or whatever, no amount of formatting that new laptop would help.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-power...

I don't believe HIDs have the ability to install arbitrary drivers. Windows will try to identify the device and locate the driver via Windows Update, or use a generic HID driver. Or the OEM may have preinstalled drivers.

In any case, a malicious keyboard can simulate keypresses and pwn your machine that way. No evil driver needed.

Buy a new boxed computer with cash from a local supplier. I doubt the NSA has installed something on every single computer.