This is interesting. I received my Purism laptop, and it had to come through customs, but my box was entirely sealed. The laptop, the Librem Key, and the QubesOS pen drive, all were in sealed bags. They were ‘vacuum’ sealed, with no way to open these without cutting them. I was super impressed with the way the device was shipped, and hope this context helps.
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New boxes. If it was opened - customs, most likely. Courier has no reason to open it.
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I got a reply to my message late Friday night. It was long and detailed and I’ve only skimmed over it once. The gist of it with regard to seals was that there are additional seals inside the shipping box. I had only explicitly asked about the outer shipping box, but their reply addressed my implicit concern. The message may have also addressed the outer box specifically, but I haven’t yet read through their reply in detail.
I received a taped box as well. Given the uncertainty of surveillance today, it was disheartening but like @mladen and @AlexE have mentioned, it was likely benign. Remember a time and day when such a thing was only mildly unsettling?
Fortunately, the device was untampered. It only makes the reason for purchasing a Purism device all the more compelling.
Well this reminds me of a story… Im impressed Fedex got out of the truck with the box. Ive watched as they walk up and place a second attempt sticker on the door and speed off… Finally after explaining the urgency of acquiring my item i was directed to a fedex dist. center where i was left in a room with one way glass and a pass thru slot while some kid went to find my package. shit you not 1.5 hours later while the lights were off in the room i placed a shim in the door striker. Talk about weird, 1.5 hours is a long time to sit there thinking of every reason at any moment doors may fly open and i may find myself in a unique situation. Talk about paranoia, Hate Fedex. anyhow someone came and said we’ll bring it to your car… as the little cart arrived the guy asked what i was going to do with this 50lb electrical component. I casually told him “just making meth”. to which he said “oh” and told me to have a good night.
Moral of my story. I would have probably done the same thing to me at that time. sometimes just for shits and giggles some of us find it humorous to exploit known or assumed vulnerabilities. cctv cameras- electronics, maybe another hint or two someone at fedex caught a whiff of and deliberately cut the box for no other reason than that. As someone mentioned, you’d definitely not be made aware of any shenanigans after the ammount of manhours and bs that has to go into physical explolts involving comm. devices.
this has nothing to do with shipping boxes from Purism in my case but - just sayin’ - if you’re nic firmware was compromised and/or your CPU - would you be able to trust the packets coming and going through the pipe even if you used “wireshark” or some other tool to sniff traffic on the network ?
by the way as far as i know you can put enough information in a few kb - and this is just from a fresh boot ~1hr sesion on Purism/forums.
if you let your imagination run wild you can end up in a pretty Faraday-cage reading a newspapper at candle-light …