25 August 2013 - Opabinia Alliance 3

Jay Scott : Daily Whale : archive : 2013 : 25 August 2013

A question remains: Opabinia must be desperately tempted to “adjust” David Miranda’s hardware before returning it, because spying is their job. If I were the Guardian, I would know that hardware that has been in the hands of an adversary can never be trusted again, and I would take it all straight to a lab (in another country) for a teardown inspection in hopes of a scoop. The question is, does Opabinia know tampering tricks that can pass teardown?

clue:

The point of using a courier to move sensitive data, rather than simply sending it through the mail, is to keep eyes on it so you know if it’s compromised. So Greenwald & co. are familiar with the idea.

Government tampering can be impressively advanced. Read about the NSA’s compromise of secure NATO faxes—how much brainpower went into that? The teardown has to include opening every chip package to see if its contents are original, and that’s only one part.

take oh take this clue away