Tens of millions of laptops have been exposed to at least as much evil maid opportunity as the author's. That's either a much stronger natural experiment than his artificial one, or the biggest sleeper attack in history. Like, the Israelis still had to blow up the centrifuge eventually...
Pure handwave. Let's call an "exposure" a one-way trip plus half the hotel stay. So the author's laptop got (3+5) * 2 = 16 exposures.
Air passengers make about 3B trips per year. A laptop lasts about three years. I said "tens of millions", so if I'm right then we have at least 16 * 20M exposures on existing laptops. That would mean at least one passenger in 28 travels with a laptop and is as careless as the author was.
That seems high to me--like, it's not too common to check your laptop (unless you were flying from an Arab country last year...). On the other hand, that ignores opportunities before the laptop's first retail sale. Those seem more attractive to me--more time to work, less diverse hardware, etc.--and almost every laptop sold is exposed that way.
So my comment above was probably too flip. His experiment still seems pointless to me, though.
I don't think he thought he was targeted, if he thought the hacker stickers would make a difference. But if I had an exploit like that and was targeting a security-conscious journalist, then (a) I'd be mystified when he checked his laptop, and probably unprepared to take advantage, and (b) I doubt I'd risk my >$1M exploit--even if I could hide it perfectly in some firmware, it still has to communicate out to the world somehow, and that's where it's likely to get noticed.
I thinking of the David Miranda case, for example. If you talk to the Intercept at all in any way prior to going through customs I think you can expect to be delayed while they take a closer look at you. Its not really paranoia if they probably are out to get you ;)
