Disassembling your laptop

So after having lectured people that they should disassemble their laptops in order to know what’s supposed to be in there, I had to do it to my own machine.

This is a Samsung N120 netbook. This is what it’s supposed to look like — at least the version without the 3G card installed, as is evident by the empty rectangle just below the hard drive, to the right of the wlan adapter.

I have many more images stored around my various hard drives and dropboxes. Closeups of the board, especially the USB headers, the wlan adapter and the hard drive, which are sort of logical places to put bugs or keyloggers. If I ever lose control of my machine for more than a few hours I will not use it for anything that needs the least bit of secrecy before I’ve had a chance to compare what it looks like now to the images of an untampered machine.

Yes, this is about secrecy. This is about increasing my trust in my computer. Ideally, you should do this before even booting your machine for the first time.

And yes, this is paranoia. But I think it is something we need to do, in order to really understand what secrecy and trust is about. Build the same trust in your computer that you have in your friends. If somene close to you is lying you can usually tell. Learn to tell if your computer is keeping secrets from you.