Customs raided my home (Finland) and lessons learned (AMA)

nothingwaslearnedthatday

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Hi all!

I wanted to share a story about how things can go south. For me, it all happened one morning as I was browsing TOR and the web in general. Suddenly, someone knocked at the door and rang the doorbell. Normally, I don't react to this sort of thing, but this time my dog was out and barking, so after a while, I decided to take a look through the front yard cameras. Well, my internet had gone down for whatever reason, and my new mobile phone refused to connect to the WiFi, which would have allowed me to check who was at the door. I thought that maybe it was someone I was expecting, so I opened the door. Well, it wasn't!

Then we started a chase to the computers, which I won, but after that, there was a brief moment where I had to decide if these people were after all my stuff or if they were agents wanting to arrest me, so I had to decide whether to fight or not. I decided not to when I saw pistols on both of these guys. Soon after, 10 more people showed up, which was way too much to handle in any case. I was wrestled down and put in handcuffs in a matter of seconds. Then a home search began, which took a few hours. After that, I was taken to the local police prison where I stayed for about 10 days before being transferred to another prison where I spent around 8 weeks. During all this time, I had no contact with the outside world. All my computers and belongings were confiscated and are still under investigation. My Pixel phone was transferred to the capital city within 24 hours in hopes of unlocking it, but that hasn't happened to this day. Also, my main laptop remained unlocked after being confiscated for 8 weeks. I found out because the only evidence some people had against me were pictures they took with a mobile phone while in my home, and from there, I could see the date and time, etc. I asked why they didn't take proper screenshots when they questioned me, and I got an answer like "What difference does it make how the pictures were taken?" I replied that I could see they were from my computer, and the date and time was when they still had access to it. After this, the pictures were taken away from me, and I think I somehow upset the agent responsible for the questioning. He or she had a very bad temper. Shame.

I can't go into too much detail about the case because there's still an active investigation against me, which also involves ongoing surveillance, including monitoring my internet activity and whatever else you can imagine. Those agents are good, I can tell you that, but they're also only human and have limited resources.

Some key takeaways I could mention are Thinkpad, Veracrypt, Google Pixel, GrapheneOS, and QubesOS. If they don't make you bulletproof, they won't make your job any easier on the other side either. And on any side of the game, everything is about resources. If you hide your ass well enough, or at least encrypt your stuff enough, there's a good chance the case against you will be dropped due to lack of resources to continue the investigation. Though I wouldn't count on it, haha.

In jail, there was quite a bit of psychological manipulation used against me, but once I figured it out, it became kind of useless. If not funny. One more thing to add: always get a lawyer from the beginning. I didn't have a proper one available from the start for reasons I can't disclose here. I had to deal with that guy for a month or so before I was able to get another one who actually helped me. Before that, I had to read my rights from books written by other people in similar situations.

That's quite a few words already. Long story short, I'm willing to answer any questions about how things unfolded.

Peace and mind your OPSEC <3
 
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G.Patton

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Thank you for your story!
 

Metribolone

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What psychological manipulation was being used on you?
 

nothingwaslearnedthatday

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There was many different types of mind fuck tried on me. Like how if I don't come clean I'll fuck up everything like my work place, my rights to see my son and also destroy life of my relatives also. Also they did lot of kind of illegal hearings without my lawyer present inside the the cell. The later one are for sure illegal stuff.
 

France

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How did they get to you? Was it just because you used the Tor browser and your internet company reported it? It would be interesting to know because I want to take precautions to avoid similar problems
 

buffalophill

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Just wanted to let you know some ways they monitor you. Nvidia graphics can be switched into a mode where the shader clock is transmits the picture upto 50 meters away. They used this on me.

The frequency was 250 MHz for those wondering. They usually secure a building close by. Apps like discord and steam have screen watching backdoors built in so avoid.

They will use a stinger fake cell tower to intercept calls and downgrade all normal calls encryption and listen in.

They will use wall contact microphones and listen to you if they cannot gain access to install one in your flat.

Secret cameras.. They are now as visible as the tip of a fiber optic cable and are very hard to find.

Consider all your hardware compromised if its ever returned.
 

nothingwaslearnedthatday

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First thanks for your advises. This was the main reason why I shared my own experiments so that maybe someone in similar situation could benefit from lessons learned earlier and in best case not even invite feds to their home in the first place.

The stuff about nVidia GPUs is creepy and I actually read few days ago while going through SDR stuff that people have successfully fetched image from security cameras, computers etc with even RTL-SDR via unintentional radio emissions and I'm not sure if I like the reality where we're living at.

About the microphones stumbled into this article which I hope is well crafted troll and not reality:


It would be nice to see TOP 100 monitoring methods used by agency/country/whatnot.


If someone is interested the RTL-SDR stuff above here's link to RTL-SDR blog where's also tooling for Tempest:

 

buffalophill

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And 1 last final reminder. The only way to lose a tail nower days is in a multistory carpark or in the subway as they do have a domestic spy satalite program which they will use to follow you. You think the creator of the FGC 9 was found by bad purchases? Most likely they were following him from the moment he met with the documentary makers and just watched him walk home.
 

nothingwaslearnedthatday

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I start to believe that my future is when it comes to being able to use devices which I want to keep private and being able to maintain anonymity is dedicated devices stashed before and rotated properly. Some devices you can even give to charity whatever so if and when it raises questions it soon can start to live new life and also give adversaries something to scratch their heads for few moments.
 
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