Now that I have had a chance to recall this story a bit more, I should not have mentioned the nation state actor aspect, it was distracting. I believe the poin

Now that I have had a chance to recall this story a bit more, I should not have mentioned the nation state actor aspect, it was distracting. I believe the point was that they wouldn't have to do the paperwork, and wait to run it up the chain for the big guns. Also, maybe the big guns would not be authorized for this particular op. I think what they were getting at was that there was probably no need for all that as there was no end point protection agent. And, now I am inferring, that on desktop Linux, with all of the additionally installed attack surface combined with how often people actually run apt update && apt uprgade && apt dist-upgrade... "it was going to be (relatively) easy."