My TL;DR Summary With time I have moved further and further away from using the computer for important things and believe that tech has long since exceeded Geor

My TL;DR Summary With time I have moved further and further away from using the computer for important things and believe that tech has long since exceeded George Orwell's wildest fever dreams I assume a freshly installed OS is compromised [1] and the hardware it is on is also compromised in the BIOS and firmware at very least by state actors but then I also assume those state actors have poorly vetted contractors that may also be compromised by other nations i.e. who pays the most gets access. I would not be surprised for a moment if they have competing backdoors that try to block one another. Since I can not control any of this I just imagine the national actors of the world are watching my screen and yawning. More likely the latest iteration of ECHELON AI is yawning. I instead focus on securing important externalities making bank accounts read-only from the web, not all banks will do this. I also diversify where my assets are stored and make a best effort to require physical access. Beyond that layer I do all the usual hardening practices but that only goes so far as every browser likely also has intentional weaknesses in them. Even FireJail and SELinux/AppArmor will likely just happily relay malicious instructions. Addons may raise the bar keeping some script-kiddies off my machine but I never for a moment assume that it stops government contractors from relaying instructions to the backdoors in the hardware and/or OS and ultimately to the hidden CPU instructions that likely take multiple layers of obfuscated instructions to tickle meaning SandSifter will never find them. The above is for PC's. For cell phones I assume FAANG are interactively on my phone and since most of them were initially funded by the government. I do not use it for anything sensitive. I also assume that all cell phones have backdoors added by their manufacturer. Each one does seem to dial home to different places and make unique DNS requests. Putting phones into developer/debug mode does seem to quiet them down which is the opposite than I would have expected so maybe they know someone may be watching. i.e. malware knows it's in a sandbox Wi-Fi Access Points are a story in and of themselves. Why should I care about state actors? That one's easy. The best contractors will have leaks in their OpsSec and for-profit companies will acquire the weaknesses and use them to do illegal and unethical things to citizens for a price and political, economic and a myriad of other motivations. I would not be surprised if some government actors sell off access and end up working for said companies. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34388990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34388990 [and hundreds of other threads]