You pose the questions but do not answer them. Assuming distros are selected purposefully you do get quite a lot of variability. Recompiling the kernel with dif

You pose the questions but do not answer them. Assuming distros are selected purposefully you do get quite a lot of variability. Recompiling the kernel with different hardening options alone makes many exploits impractical. The threat modeling that you see in this thread is laughable. Nobody has infinite resources, not even NSA. They can't throw all their capability at you alone. In fact they are not even interested in any one individual. They might be interested in some groups of people like "terrorist leadership" but even in that case they don't have the need to hack all people matching that group. So at every step of the decision making process there is a cost benefit analysis. And in the end NSA will only hack some terrorist leaders, the ones deemed sufficiently significant but not any more risky then is necessary. The amount of meetings and paperwork required for carrying out offensive action is significant and everyone involved is very risk averse. Getting superiors to sign up for an operation against an individual capable of detecting attack and thus risking attribution would only be possible if the proposed techniques can be shown to be extraordinarily stealthy. That requires replicating the system in the lab and rigorously testing methodology beforehand. Yeah, it is hard to protect organizations from nation states. Because all sufficiently complex systems have bugs and given long enough time persistent attackers will find & exploit these bugs. But that's because organizations have other real-world priorities besides fighting NSA. These organizations can't change protocols overnight and replace core systems just for fun of it. Individuals actually have an advantage here because they can rotate systems at will and have much higher control over their personal lives than any CEO/CTO/CISO has over their organization. As a result, yes you can raise the cost of an attack against you high enough that NSA won't bother hacking you - either because there are other people who are less protected but hacking them would fulfill the same objective or because your ass gets handed to another agency which is able to present more cost-effective solution. Your link demonstrates this dichotomy between options that NSA has available for hacking organizations vs individuals. Individuals rarely have well documented procurement processes available for third party auditing you know.