The CIA's New Black Bag Is Digital

" … one of the men pulled out a disk and loaded some programs onto the resident's laptop computer while the other man kept watch at the window. The whole operation took less than two minutes, then the two trespassers fled the way they came, leaving no trace that they had ever been there.

It did not take long for the official to determine that the two men were, in fact, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives conducting what is known in the U.S. intelligence community as either a "black bag job" or a "surreptitious entry" operation."

I wonder how sophisticated that operation was (and how sophisticated today's equivalent is).

Would _you_ know if someone had loaded some new software onto your laptop? How would you protect against that? I wonder if running Tripwire on my OS X and Linux laptops as well as on servers might be smart? WOuld Tripwire be likely to be of any use against modern CIA-style "black bagging"?