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  • mhoyemhoye@cosocial.ca
    Nov 9, 2026, 4:30 PM

    One of the things that used to be standard practice at an old job was that when an Important Person went to Certain Countries, they got a new phone and a new laptop and both of them contained a carefully curated set of exactly and only what they needed for that trip and nothing else at all.

    When they got back somebody with no sense of humor whatsoever met them at the airport, took those devices away and destroyed them off site.

    That was just what the trip cost, the price of the ticket.

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Replies

  • mhoyemhoye@cosocial.ca
    Nov 9, 2026, 5:08 PM

    The rare stories from the world of serious full time spooks that make it out to street level are incredible. Travelling with faraday-cage blackout tents to unpack in hotel rooms, because every room is being recorded all the time and tempest shielding isn't good enough. Phones that get an software update nobody else does. That glass of wine has more booze in it than you think. Every charming, pretty person you meet works for the other team. The full court press on every axis, all the time.

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 4:35 PM

    @mhoye even now i think i could probably wrangle a functioning laptop and phone for cheaper than the cost of a round trip ticket to the 110th meridian east

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  • mhoyemhoye@cosocial.ca
    Nov 9, 2026, 5:17 PM

    @mcc Yeah. Depending on what you mean by 'functioning', you can go pretty barebones if you're happy to write it off entirely after a week.

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 5:22 PM

    @mhoye I mean, I guess it's POSSIBLE that me buying a daily driver laptop for $700 Canadian correlates with me having all these problems with this laptop

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  • Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPETimWardCam@c.im
    Nov 9, 2026, 4:53 PM

    @mhoye Yes, there are employers for whom this is standard practice.

    I don't know whether they now regard the USA as a "Certain Country".

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  • Spacewizard! (Ed H)spacewizard@mas.to
    Nov 9, 2026, 6:00 PM

    @TimWardCam @mhoye I think that being that terrifying an intelligence menace requires a level of "having your shit together" that the current US government absolutely does not possess

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  • Jess👾JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange
    Nov 9, 2026, 5:27 PM

    @mhoye These countries don't bother with that sort of stuff as much anymore because they can just hack the phones over the wire by making them fall for some spearphish...

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  • mhoyemhoye@cosocial.ca
    Nov 9, 2026, 5:31 PM

    @JessTheUnstill Most of the time they don't even need a scheme that complicated, really. In a lot of places (Singapore, Poland, others in my personal experience) you need to present your passport to get a local SIM card. But they do that specifically to send a message; in Heathrow you buy your SIM with a credit card, which amounts to the same thing.

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  • slashagreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 9:04 PM

    @mhoye One person I worked with had a job of meeting coworkers at a three-letter-agency far away from HQ. They had information and reports, but could not be seen anywhere near HQ. So he'd meet them at a coffee shop or food court or something, and the other person would just shove a stack of papers across the table. No cover sheets, no envelopes. Just highly classified "take" completely unprotected. That one always cracks me up.

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  • David J. Atkinsonmeltedcheese@c.im
    Nov 9, 2026, 5:40 PM

    @mhoye If you are a “person of interest” then you should assume you are a target of some degree of surveillance. There is no real way to hide, but you can make it more difficult, or so we are told.

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  • Eli the Beardedelithebearded@fed.qaz.red
    Nov 9, 2026, 5:54 PM

    @mhoye

    Acquaintance of mine needed to go to North Korea for work and got himself a burner laptop for the trip. Since it was his purchase, no corpo to take it away. He uses it for managing little league baseball stuff now, hoping it will confuse whoever is monitoring it

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