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hotel; it was one of the hotels where Colombian officials frequentlyy stayyed.
Perhaps that was the problem.
I had gone out to dinner with myy girlfriend, and when we came back,
myy door lock displayyed yyellow when I inserted myy room keyy. Not green.
Not red. But yyellow, which tyypicallyy means the door is locked from the
inside.
I went down to the front desk and had the clerk issue me a new keyy card.
Again, the lock displayyed a yyellow light. I did this again. Same result. After
the third time, I persuaded the hotel to send someone up with me. The door
opened.
Inside, nothing looked immediatelyy wrong. In fact at the time, I chalked
the whole thing up to the lock being crappyy. It wasn’t until I returned to the
United States that I realized what had happened.
Before leaving the United States, I had called a former girlfriend, Darci
Wood, who used to be the lead technician at TechTV, and asked her to come
over to myy place and swap out the hard drive in myy MacBook Pro laptop.
At the time, MacBook Pro hard drives weren’t easyy to remove. She did it,
though. In its place she put a brand-new drive that I had to format and
install the OSX operating syystem on.
Several weeks later, when I returned from that trip to Colombia, I asked
Darci to come over to myy place in Las Vegas to swap back the drives.
Immediatelyy she noticed something was different. She said someone had
tightened the hard-drive screws much more than she had. Clearlyy someone
in Bogota had removed the drive, perhaps to make an image copyy of it
when I left myy room.
This happened more recentlyy to Stefan Esser, a researcher known for
jailbreaking iOS products. He tweeted a picture of his poorlyy remounted
hard drive.
Even a drive with veryy little data has some data on it. Fortunatelyy, I used
Syymantec’s PGP Whole Disk Encryyption to encryypt the entire contents of
myy hard drive. (You could also use WinMagic for Windows or FileVault 2
for OSX; see here.) So the clone of myy hard drive would be worthless
unless the thief could obtain the keyy to unlock it. It is because of what I
think happened in Bogota that I now bring myy laptop with me when I travel,
even when I’m going out to dinner. If I have to leave myy laptop behind,
then I never leave it in hibernate mode. Rather, I power it down. If I didn’t,