What this all has in common is no one is engaging in a complex personal surveillance enterprise to target you, because they don't need to.
It's not even a $5 wrench scenario, because they don't care: the point of jack booted thugs is you simply apply force to every problem and potential problem, and dare anyone to stop you.
Yeah. If you've drawn the unfavorable attention of the police (which I'm aware isn't difficult in many cases), it's extremely unlikely any of them are thinking "let's painstakingly disassemble and reassemble this guy's laptop!" But like I said upthread, there are still several plausible reasons why you might want to secure your hardware (and the threat of arbitrary police surveillance still isn't zero).
But on another note, in many countries (where digital privacy isn't already illegal) law enforcement is pushing for encryption backdoors and the like, so that kind of wiretapping will be their go-to, and in the police's ideal world they will simply be able to remotely log in to any phone, operating system, or CPU firmware and rummage around to their heart's content.
Until that comes to pass (heaven forbid), I doubt they will usually make the effort to check anyone's screws for nail polish. They're all about the brute force.
> It's not even a $5 wrench scenario
It's a $0 "type in your password or we're sticking you in a cell and leaving for the weekend" scenario.
> It's a $0 "type in your password or we're sticking you in a cell and leaving for the weekend" scenario.
Missing the point: the point is - they're not listening at all. They don't care. You're not a problem to be taken seriously and carefully investigated. You're going to be stuck in the cell and forgotten about anyway. Your equipment will be destroyed. No one is looking.
Corrupt police are often motivated by money, so the scenario could be: "we overheard you talking about transferring money/cryptocurrency/whatever and we are confiscating it, gives us access or else".
My point in starting this thread wasn't that the police are evil/misunderstood/chaotic-neutral, it was that the threat model here shouldn't be solely about one kind of adversary.
It's not even a $5 wrench scenario, because they don't care: the point of jack booted thugs is you simply apply force to every problem and potential problem, and dare anyone to stop you.