Question: What happens if the NSA has a user in its sights?
Snowden: The target person is completely monitored. An analyst will get a daily report about what has changed in the computer system of the targeted person. There will also be... packages with certain data which the automatic analysis systems have not understood, and so on. The analyst can then decide what he wants to do - the computer of the target person does not belong to them anymore, it then more or less belongs to the U.S. government.
I wonder if regularly wiping and reinstalling your operating system has any effect on the aforementioned computer compromising by government/criminal elements?
Obviously, an open source OS is a better choice than some closed, proprietary, OS, but I seem to remember some controversy about BSD developers being approached by government agents for the purpose of coding a backdoor into the systems which they were working on.
Snowden: The target person is completely monitored. An analyst will get a daily report about what has changed in the computer system of the targeted person. There will also be... packages with certain data which the automatic analysis systems have not understood, and so on. The analyst can then decide what he wants to do - the computer of the target person does not belong to them anymore, it then more or less belongs to the U.S. government.
I wonder if regularly wiping and reinstalling your operating system has any effect on the aforementioned computer compromising by government/criminal elements?
Obviously, an open source OS is a better choice than some closed, proprietary, OS, but I seem to remember some controversy about BSD developers being approached by government agents for the purpose of coding a backdoor into the systems which they were working on.
Just how secure is my unix-like OS?