It was in a military facility in the seventies, and always when the general visited the computers crashed. This happened too often to be a demonstration effect, it turned out to be the metal in the generals shoes interfering with the electronics.
Just the kind of bug which seems ridiculous as a bug report, but turns out to be true.
Like the "OpenOffice.org won’t print on Tuesdays" bug, or the bug which crashed the computer when the general visited. Or the one when the server went down whenever a certain guy had a support ticket.
It also allows scanning all the border-crossing internet traffic. Which is an NSA-style dragnet since there is mostly international traffic in a small country.
I'm currently trying out Jitsi and XMPP. It seems to work well on new clients, on some older systems there are crashes when they go to sleep, which I couldn't fix yet.
> I see all of this more a question of "can Americans actually have anything remain private on a commercial device?".
It's Americans now, but if Apple gives in, investigators from other big markets might pressure Apple to do the same for them. I think that's what's meant with cutting the ribbon many times.
Transfering the data or even the whole harddisk is possible. However if the scool has registered the serial numbers of the laptops, for example for warranty tracking, you're out of luck.