Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
IIRC for the beijing olympic games, BHP gave their people[0] shiny new thinkpads to take to China, instead of taking their existing corporate laptops. I heard ASIO (WTF? Not ASIS or DFAT?) told them to expect Chinese intelligence to take laptops out of hotel safes, dd them, then put them back. I don't think they do it for normal visits to e.g. Surinam and South Africa, tho.
Sounds about right. Back in 1999, I worked as head of the system administration department at a Linux-industry pre-IPO firm[1] where I had an excellent hunch, eventually proved correct, that the new CTO was somehow tapping all company electronic communications. (Later, it emerged that he was monitoring via the ethernet switches.) I reasoned that, if I couldn't trust the integrity of company infrastructure generally, I also couldn't fully trust my Debian-based personal workstation, either, as he might be able to either trojan it subtly enough to make detection difficult or install a hardware keylogger. Because the notion of this particular person having any form of visibiltiy into my _personal_ activity between me and my server at home, I bought for the first time a laptop, always used it rather than my workstation for anything sensitive, and never, ever left it unattended. [1] http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/essays/preipo.html