> you need to get from where you are to where the laptop is, and back, without popping up on any sensors.
Why? As far as They can tell, you're going to a house you've never been to before with no precedent for why, picking up an unlabelled brown box, and returning home.
The NSA would know you did that — but they wouldn't be able to connect it to a laptop in order to intercept/MITM it into being an insecure device (or to note down its MAC address for when you go online with it), since the "logistics chain" would be one entirely disconnected from you right until the moment you showed up at the house. To bug the laptop, they'd have to literally rip it out of your hands. Until the moment you pull into that house's driveway to pick up the parcel, they don't know it's your laptop (or what it is at all, really) so they don't know they should be trying to intercept it.
(And yes, They would likely have footage showing some other person dropping the unlabelled brown box off in the house's parking lot — but that would be a person who is not flagged as a Person of Interest in any NSA system, but rather some bright-eyed innocent college kid who had started a "new job" to "earn money fast" by "delivering parcels" just the day before. Parcels they pick up and re-box at AirBnB single-day rentals, rented just for the purpose of receiving that one parcel by the money-launderer.)
Replace "laptop" with "box full of dirty money" and this exact thing is done hundreds of times every day, with the NSA being able to do roughly zilch about it. "Cash mule" wouldn't exist as a profession if the transactions they facilitate could just be deanonymized+disintermediated in real time.
Why? As far as They can tell, you're going to a house you've never been to before with no precedent for why, picking up an unlabelled brown box, and returning home.
The NSA would know you did that — but they wouldn't be able to connect it to a laptop in order to intercept/MITM it into being an insecure device (or to note down its MAC address for when you go online with it), since the "logistics chain" would be one entirely disconnected from you right until the moment you showed up at the house. To bug the laptop, they'd have to literally rip it out of your hands. Until the moment you pull into that house's driveway to pick up the parcel, they don't know it's your laptop (or what it is at all, really) so they don't know they should be trying to intercept it.
(And yes, They would likely have footage showing some other person dropping the unlabelled brown box off in the house's parking lot — but that would be a person who is not flagged as a Person of Interest in any NSA system, but rather some bright-eyed innocent college kid who had started a "new job" to "earn money fast" by "delivering parcels" just the day before. Parcels they pick up and re-box at AirBnB single-day rentals, rented just for the purpose of receiving that one parcel by the money-launderer.)
Replace "laptop" with "box full of dirty money" and this exact thing is done hundreds of times every day, with the NSA being able to do roughly zilch about it. "Cash mule" wouldn't exist as a profession if the transactions they facilitate could just be deanonymized+disintermediated in real time.