I consider myself “recreationally paranoid”. I like to consider possible avenues of attack on me, and work out mitigations where possible. I’ve always considered it a subset of some people’s “hacker mindset”. The question of “How would I break into my stuff if I were motivated to, and what can I do to prevent it or make it more difficult to break?” provides me with a lot of satisfying thinking, even though I’m not planning to overthrow a government or move shipping containers of narcotics across borders.
I’m far more concerned about a thief trying to rob my house than I am about the government coming in for my computers. In fact, in that scenario I’d rather let them have my computers unharmed as it would prove whatever they’re looking for doesn’t exist on my machines. My concern is how do I sufficiently back up data for replacements.
I have practically zero concern about thieves robbing my house. I lock the doors when I go out, and pay for insurance.
It’s happened only once to me in over 50 years, and that was because I foolishly assumed a 3rd story window was safe to leave open, when there was enough plumbing on the wall that a determined enough petty thief could climb through it. All I lost was a computer (a PowerMac 6100) but had recent-enough backups at work that it was only minority annoying to replace and deal with insurance. (There was personal email and the like on it, and stored passwords. I monitored the email server carefully for 6 or 12 months after that, and never saw a single login attempt. Whatever they did with it, they wiped it before they connected it to the internet and the email logged I automatically).
I’m also not so concerned about my government coming in for my computers. They’re too incompetent to do it well except for major targets. I do enjoy the thought experiments around “what would happen if the government ‘went bad’?”
(I’m also aware the I, like probably everybody, have data on my machines that if cherry picked by prosecutors would be awkward to have to defend myself against in court. I often rant about wanting to stab my idiot co workers in small group chats for example. If I were a prosecutor trying for force me into a plea bargain or an leo attempting to coerce me into doing something I’d prefer not to do, I have no doubt that a fairly damning looking case could be constructed by choosing only the parts of my data that when put together paint a bad but fictitious/out-of-context story...)
I consider myself “recreationally paranoid”. I like to consider possible avenues of attack on me, and work out mitigations where possible. I’ve always considered it a subset of some people’s “hacker mindset”. The question of “How would I break into my stuff if I were motivated to, and what can I do to prevent it or make it more difficult to break?” provides me with a lot of satisfying thinking, even though I’m not planning to overthrow a government or move shipping containers of narcotics across borders.