What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

By the very fact of the device being pre-owned, it is inherently possibly tainted.

Such an inconvenience. They should reimburse the cost of the laptop say to standard tune of 3-5k government cheques and allow for you to pick up your laptop in return for the money, if you need it.

Full on encryption, tmp lock and filesystem hashing via tripwire then is mandatory. Fun thing is that you can screw up the malware to send all kinds nasty shit back to them, like trojans and viruses, PIF files and EXE files and whatever might tickle your fancy. Then get your malware do maximum damage on their network.

After all they hacked your laptop, they engaged in illegal activity and it is only fare for you to punish them to the fullest extent of your technical capability.

They cannot acknowledge the fact that they hacked your laptop without a warrant.

etc.etc.

There's tons of fun to have this way. Since people who are doing these things are expecting you to be retarded luser and so you can set a trap and have them fall straight into that.

Make a blog post and example of malware and how to entrap the said trespassers, what does malware do etc.

my 2c.

This has been the case for some time, and I doubt the unaccountable bureaucracy is going to change. So the only thing we can do is disrespect, mitigate, and undermine.

Here was my ad-hoc procedure from traveling internationally a few months ago (tourism), with a prior of not really expecting to be hassled on the way there, but unknown for the way back:

1. Choose the laptop I'm least likely to miss in the case it gets stolen by JBTs, with respect to the functionality I require.

2. Wipe(1) the first 10MB of disk (has only ever been LUKS), then one /dev/urandom pass into the entire thing. (In retrospect, zeros may have been better than random)

3. Reinstall Debian, with a passphrase I don't mind giving up. Sync over only files that I don't mind giving up.

4. Go through Japanese customs - the only question asked was "Are you with him?" (friend in front of me).

5a. At this point, I possess a still uncompromised machine at the destination, with stored ssh host keys, etc. When (last-minute) prepping, this possibility didn't quite occur to me. Not being prepared to take full advantage of this was regrettable.

5b. (If machine had been molested, I would have not logged into my privileged accounts at all. For the most part I didn't have to anyway, but since I wasn't fully prepared it came in handy once or twice)

6. For return, wipe first 10MB of disk again, then one /dev/zero pass to the entire thing (so there was no argument that I had encrypted data). Then mkdosfs on a whole-disk partition for derp-nothingness. (This was done with a Debian install image written to an old flash drive I had with me for the purpose. My only concern at this point is the hardware getting stolen.

7. Take hard drive out of laptop so that it is a separate device. This would most likely increase suspicion, but make them even less justified in stealing the whole machine (not that this would stop them).

8. Get waved through coming back through USG because laptop "searches" aren't actually that common for people not on the primary watchlist (everyone is on the secondary watchlist). Still, I will do the same thing next time, and think it irresponsible to not.

There are of course improvements that could be made to this, including a small default-booting "nothing to see here" install, with file times etc automatically adjusted. Automatic copying of machine credentials etc when you're at your destination. Using a separate partition instead of the flash drive. And of course automation of the process so it's easy for everyone to do :)

Isn't BIOS passwords useless?

For non-soldered but socketed BIOSes I think one can just take chip out and put it into your wallet, possibly, covering some pins with some dissolvable insulating substance. For soldered SPI EEPROM chips with known pinout, I think one can reflash the chip afterwards.

What tools could be used to boot off a trusted, non-writable USB stick to checksum the BIOS?

Difficulty level: Macbook Air