[Cryptography] Ranking what draws surveillance attention

[Kent Borg]

On 2/16/26 12:07 PM, zeb at qtt.se wrote:
> What finally made you realise the tampering, time and afterthought, or 
> something tangible?

I don't know that there /was/ ever any tampering. They might have just 
been looking at the computer, wondering what they could do, and then 
rushing the machine back to the cloakroom before we got there. The fact 
they put up the delay suggests we finished the museum sooner than they 
had hoped, we interrupted their plans.

Certainly there are ways they could have left something behind in the 
machine, but I don't know they had the ability at that date, in that 
amount of time, targeting little ol' me. The fact that the sleeping 
computer was still sleeping soundly suggests they maybe didn't do 
anything. I never noticed anything strange about it afterwards, but 
neither did I subject to any specific examination.


I realized because even I am not infinitely dim, a considerable amount 
of time before I finally realized, "Duh!", the distraction was not an 
odd Chinese man inspired by Obama. No, it was a distraction custom 
designed to delay /us/, to buy them a specific amount of safety time 
they designed into their operation. No accident.

I'll glad I did not realize at the time what was going on, I could have 
gotten myself in trouble.


-kb, the Kent who was freely allowed to fly home to Boston a few days later.
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