How to defeat spyware

[Dr. Evil]

> Setting a trap gun to blow away anyone who inserts a floppy (or
> hooks up a cable) to a machine he has not been given access to is
> morally permissable.

Morally permissable or not, a shotgun and a string are unlikely to be
effective.  The FBI went so far as to get a law passed that says that
they can use classified technical techniques to execute the warrant so
that they don't have to reveal their methods in court.  Could those
methods include something as simple as a backdoor in Windows, or some
kind of hack into Windows?  I don't have any evidence one way or the
other, but it's a reasonable possibility.  These guys are risk averse
and they are on a budget, and sending in a team of armed hackers is
both risky and expensive.

Before you get the shotgun and some string and risk blowing your own
head off, install a real OS.  Do you think the FBI break-in team has
an OpenBSD rootkit?  Not likely!  Then take some simple, non-violent
measures to make your computer a little bit tamper resistant.  It
could be as trivial as a webcam pointing to your computer, storing its
images off-site.  Take a look at
http://linux.davecentral.com/articles/view/1053/ for a neat program
called motion which runs under Linux and works with plain old cheap
webcams to do exactly this.

My attitude is to think about simple things and think about ways to
de-escalate a conflict as much as possible, so I'm not so enthusiastic
about a shotgun on a string.