I believe law enforcement has put spyware on my macbook without a warrant. How can I tell if this is true? EtreCheck diagnostic report included

Concerned-Citizen72:

Your original post (by same name) from 2 hrs earlier, also has a valid reply:

• Q: I believe law enforcement has put spyware on my macbook without a

warrant. How can I tell if this is true? EtreCheck diagnostic report included

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252940514

With the exceptional addition of a reference to Drive DX.

PS:

Also: a SSD may run slower, if Trim

could've been enabled; but wasn't.

If you truly believe warrant-less bugging has occurred, you should be consulting a lawyer, and getting a forensic expert examining your Mac.

Note: You have a 2012 Mac running a 2018 operating system. You only have 8GB of RAM.

EtreCheck thinks your SSD is performing slowly. You do not have a lot of free storage available, which will aggravate the SSD's ability to keep ahead of writes. This is important because an SSD needs to pre-clean blocks before any write. It try to keep a ready pool of pre-cleaned blocks, but SSD's need to pre-clean a cluster of adjacent blocks, and if there are any current good data in every cluster, then the SSD needs to copy the good data to somewhere else, then do the pre-clean. This can seriously slow down an SSD. Finding more storage you can delete so you have a larger amount of free storage would help. But considering your SSD is 9 years old, it may also be running out of spare blocks, as consumer SSD's actually have a limited number of writes. SSD's attempt to do wear leveling to spread out the pain, but eventually blocks are going to become unreliable and need to be retired and a spare used. When you run out of spares, or get very low, it is going to affect performance, especially if you do not have a lot of free blocks to aid in the pre-cleaning process.

You use Chrome, which is a known resource hog.

You have a bunch of music services, which is you are streaming music, will affect your network bandwidth. If you have 100's of megabits of bandwidth, that should not be an issue, but if you have a 25'ish megabit bandwidth service, the music streaming may affect things. TIDAL helper comes up as consuming 8.88% of your CPU and a good chunk of your network and Energy usage. Not sure what it is doing, only you would know.

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you" - Joseph Heller, Catch 22

You're asking him/her to post whatever illegal activity they might have engaged in?

Why law would enforcement put spyware on your mac.

You are not in a movie or a video game.

Etrecheck report looks okay, it does pick up on your SSD being too slow.

Download and run https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx this will generate a report on

your SSD and rate its performance.

And your battery needs looking at.

Now why do you think you are of interest to the law that they would be spying on you.