Ask Slashdot: Securing a Journalist's Laptop Against a Police Search? 324
Bruce66423 writes: In the light of the British police's seizure of a BBC laptop what is the right configuration and practices to ensure that such a seizure provides zero information to the cops? This post from Thursday might be a good place for some ideas, but that one's expressly about securing a Chromebook; what would you advise for securing a more conventional laptop? (Or desktop, for that matter.)
Laptop (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't store your information on the laptop in the first place. Just use it as an editing and remote-access tool over a secure connection or to a USB stick you don't expose to search procedures.
That's about the best you can do, short of memorizing everything.
Encrypt the laptop, and you could lose it. Just let them search it top to bottom, then when they're done and you're wherever you're going, wipe the hard drive, reinstall your OS, and carry on.
It's really not a great idea to carry information you need to be secure around with you.
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Does anyone make a little ruggedized case for an SD card that you can swallow?
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Why? Break it in two parts and its very expensive to restore data. Drop it into the toilet and flush. Nobody will find it.
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Why swallow? Micro SD is small enough to hide in your shoe. Rip the inner sole slightly and carve out a tiny slot. The police might check your shoes quickly but they won't look close. The metal will block scanners.
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Why swallow? .
That's what she said.
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Why swallow? Micro SD is small enough to hide in your shoe. Rip the inner sole slightly and carve out a tiny slot. The police might check your shoes quickly but they won't look close. The metal will block scanners.
Even at airports, you're required to take off your shoes and have them X-rayed. I'm sure a targeted search by police would be at least as thorough.
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Most shoes and sneakers have a strip metal along the sole for rigidity. Take an old pair apart sometime. I always seem to break the inner soles of my footwear. That is how I know.
Unless they see something obvious you can hide a microsd card there without an issue. I have yet to see a police officer do more than a quick visual inspection tion/ X-ray of shoes.
Re:Laptop (Score:4, Interesting)
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I have a couple of micro-SD cards hidden inside a USB thumbdrive. There's plenty of space for them, and an X-ray scan will just show layers of small chips, just like what's already in a USB thumbdrive.
I seriously doubt that anyone would think to look there for extra data storage. Well, until I posted this, that is...
Other possible places include inside the key caps on full size keyboards, inside RJ-45 and HDMI sockets, in the clamp of metal watchbands (with a wad of fluff on top to hide it from casual ins
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Better to have a specially designed clothing or coat buttons to store the microSD in.
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No. It isn't. If you get caught intentionally trying to smuggle, it'll go poorly for you. Just don't carry it in the first place. There's no actual need to, so why do it?
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I doubt there's a law against carrying a low-value SD card in your shoe.
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And once they suspect that, they will just x-ray you, like they do for drugs. And then wait until it comes out and maybe slap a few extra charges on you.
Re:Laptop (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Laptop (Score:2)
This!
I'm not saying this is the way to go for all needs. Personally, I hate to use web apps for everything. But, for complete security when crossing borders, your info should just stay home.
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"Just use it as an editing and remote-access tool over a secure connection or to a USB stick you don't expose to search procedures."
Forget the "secure" connection. There's a much larger attack surface there for people to exploit.
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"Encrypt the laptop, and you could lose it."
Sorry but I suspect encrypted or not, it's extremely unlikely it wouldn't be taken anyhow. That's just how this stuff is. With a very very long process in getting it back to boot.
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This is actually the solution. Learn some mnemonic techniques.
Some people use a passphrase form a commonly accessible book (i.e. the bible, War and Peace, Aesop's Fables, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc). Just find a section you want and use the next 5 or ten words without spaces as the passphrase.
You don't even have to memorize it because this stuff is easy to locate online. Search to find the verse or section you want, locate the string of words, and there you go.
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You clearly don't.(It is exceedingly large in fact)
Easy (Score:2, Informative)
Easy: Store nothing sensitive anywhere on the laptop. Make sure all browsing history/data is wiped before the laptop is every put to sleep/hibernate.
Complete Deniability that data exists (Score:5, Interesting)
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But Truecrypt is no longer secure.
Are you sure? Last I read was they shut down the project with a vague statement like that but nothing to back it up. The recent audits showed it was still a good product from what I remember.
Re:Complete Deniability that data exists (Score:5, Informative)
TrueCrypt probably triggered their warrant canary and the dev team decided to call it quits, since NSLs are so much fun to fight for people living in the formerly free country known as the US. In the mean time, code forked and picked up here: https://veracrypt.codeplex.com... [codeplex.com]
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Nobody has found any real crypto weaknesses in TrueCrypt to date, in public or in any of the private crypto groups I know of. This article claims that two TrueCrypt driver bugs expose systems to a privilege escalation attack, and these have been fixed in VeraCrypt: http://www.itworld.com/article... [itworld.com]
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Some flaws the audits missed were discovered a month ago, at least on Windows:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/t... [zdnet.com]
Don't have anything for them to find (Score:5, Insightful)
Best bet is simply not to have anything for them to find. Store your data on a thumb drive (that you'll carry or ship separately) or upload it to your own server or a service like Google Drive or Dropbox, encrypting it or not first, all depending on how sensitive the information is. Delete it or secure-wipe it or wipe the whole drive and do a complete factory restore on your laptop depending on how invasive you think the search might be. Then let the cops search all they want, they won't find what isn't there.
NB: Linux makes a better platform for this than Windows. On Windows bits of your files can end up in the oddest places to be found during a scan of the drive. On Linux it's easy to set up a separate partition where all your data will go and be certain it didn't leave traces anywhere else, and that partition can be secure-wiped and reformatted without messing up the OS installation in the process. Plus the cops are less likely to be familiar with Linux, and you can play the dumb-non-techie card of "I dunno, it's whatever the guys in IT put on it. I just follow the instructions to run my programs and everything works.".
Re:Don't have anything for them to find (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell me my tinfoil hat is on too tight if you want, but I *strongly* suspect its NOT going to be *too* far in the future when those of us who refuse to use Windows and use Linux instead will be charged with violation of a yet-to-be-passed law, but one that is almost surely to be passed by the authoritarian thugs that currently infest most governments. For all we know, this sneaky Transpacific Partnership abortion thats making its way thru the halls of congress may have the beginnings of such in it, and since we, the unwashed plebes, are not privy to its contents, heaven only knows what is in it. Both the US and UK are diving at a faster and faster rate down towards blatant totalitarianism.. When you look at the many traffic analylsises that have been on Microsoft's latest offering, you start to wonder if they've not gone into partnership with the NSA to fill up that giant datacenter in Utah with everything you do on your Windows machine. This being the main reason I suspect it won't be too long before those of us who don't suck at the MS tit, will be persecuted for using an OS that doesn't feed the MS/NSA behemoth... Before you accuse me of being paranoid, stop and think about what I said.... Glad I'm 65 and not a youngster growing up in this ever-increasing totalitarian world...
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Best bet is simply not to have anything for them to find. Store your data on a thumb drive (that you'll carry or ship separately) or upload it to your own server or a service like Google Drive or Dropbox, encrypting it or not first, all depending on how sensitive the information is.
Bingo. This is the only way to avoid the whole mess of having data for them to become suspicious of in the first place. Don't have anything for them to find or become suspicious of.
Once they find encrypted data most law enforcement authorities will automatically assume something nefarious, and even if they don't, they'll still want to see what it is.
And they'll use the old "We think it might be child porn" as an excuse to hold you for as long as they can get away with (and these days that may be forever).
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Yes, but if you're dealing with a situation where they'll hold and interrogate you for an extended period even if they find absolutely no evidence at all then you have bigger problems than how to keep them from finding anything. In that situation the only way to avoid this is to not go there in the first place and if you have to go there the question's more along the lines of how do you get in and out without them finding out you're you along the way. And that frankly is seriously out-of-scope for this kind
Not possible (Score:4)
In the British Police-State, that is not possible, unless the journalist is willing to go to prison for failing to disclose an encryption password. Forget about "plausible deniability", that is for kids and morons. It does not work in practice.
The time to protect essential freedoms in Britain is past, and the battle (pathetic though as it has been) is lost. Anybody now trying to protect itself will just be classified as a "terror supporter" and that is it. Expect concentration camps to be opened soon.
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Recent events don't seem to support that assertion. The Guardian was able to handle the Snowden files without being imprisoned or losing them. Okay, some MI5 goons made a show of destroying a few laptops, and the footage ended up on YouTube and the stories were published anyway.
The BBC's mistake was not protecting their journalist's data properly. If you take precautions, it's possible. In this case, if they had used a live CD so there was no trace, and protected the contract details with encryption the po
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The question was about an individual journalist. If you have an organization large and well-known enough to be hard to touch and somebody with real courage on the top, then you have a chance. But the editor of the Guardian _was_ willing to go to prison, if that was what it took. And that _is_ what it takes in a police state slowly going towards full-blown fascism.
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Enough has been written about the utter stupidity of "plausible deniability". It is almost impossible to be "careful and don't leave breadcrumbs" even for experts. Go land yourself in hot water if you like. But don't say you were not warned.
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Care to share some links? The only thing I'm aware of that you may be referring to is that the Windows implementation of TrueCrypt has a bug where it doesn't properly exclude the hidden filesystem from search indexing or somesuch. The concept is sound. And if you're using hidden volumes, you really should be using live CDs to inspect the hidden volumes anyway.
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That is the main non-technical problem. The main technical one is that you must not use the cover OS installation to protect the hidden area (which is glaringly obvious) or that the hidden area must be protected against overwriting (which is glaringly obvious).
The whole thing is a smart idea that completely falls on its face when confronted with technical and non-technical realities. Unfortunately, most people are far too much removed from reality to see that and hence live in this fantasy-world where this
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Even in the UK, they must prove that there is a key and that you at one point had access to it in the past year. If they prove you had access to the key in the past year, then the burden shifts to you to prove that you no longer have access to the key.
It's a bad law, but don't spread disinformation about it. And the US situation is much, much better.
Tails and remote storage (Score:3, Informative)
On your Laptop there is a normal Windows installation which is not used for work. Only for stuff like browsing the web in the evening at the hotel. mails to the kids, etc.
On a USB stick on the keychain there is a copy of Tails https://tails.boum.org/index.e... [boum.org]
You rent some VPS or root server in a country of your choice, under a different name, preferably paid via cash. This is the place where all the data for work is stored. encrypted.
This server you only access via Tails which uses Tor by default.
If you can't do this, you put an encrypted VM onto your Laptop which happens to have the data for work and you write your stuff or access the web for work related research only in this VM. Again using a distro like Tails.
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The VPS+Tails idea is about the only one that can work. Better write nothing down though and better make sure your tails copy is always current and cannot be tampered with. Incidentally, renting a VPS with cash is impossible almost everywhere, but you do not actually need to. Just make sure it is a country that is unlike to cooperate with your enemy. In addition, better make sure to only work on it via hidden service or it may well get attacked by "hackers" in some routine government-sponsored break-ins.
The
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Indeed. An that is just one of the problems.
If you're in Britain (Score:3)
Don't store anything on the laptop. The fact they can legally compel you to provide the means of data access means you are in trouble in every case which they have possession of both you and your laptop. You can either do a really good job of hiding the data or you can keep it outside of where they can get it. How about a remote server a trusted person can deactivate if they hear about your situation?
Short answer (Score:2)
Don't have a drive in it. Don't have bits that they can claim to find suspicious. No excuses, because even (or perhaps especially) if they don't find anything on your laptop they'll confiscate it anyway to have the boys back at the shop take it apart ten ways from Sunday.
When you arrive, buy a new drive and load it up. How? Well, if you're visiting a field (or home) office, they'll have a disk image handy for you to use. If there are private bits that you haven't shipped over yet (SRSLY? They travel f
Invest in a 4G account (Score:2)
Get yourself a 4G account and mail the Veracrypt file to a safe country.
1, 2, 3 (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Use Linux for the simple reason you can separate partitions. Create a separate /home partition that mounts on an encrypted removable drive, like an Ironkey.
2. Do all work on the removable drive.
3. Never cross a border with both the laptop and the removable drive. Ship out courier the drive separately and carry the laptop.
This way there is nothing on the laptop to be searched or seized.
There are limits (Score:2)
to what you can actually do.
You can hide files in a hidden container, you can encrypt files and give the key to someone in a different jurisdiction. But, in the end, if they have you and they have the computer, they will probably get what they want. We used to call it "rubber hose crypto".
If you don't have to bring the data with you, don't. Put the encrypted data somewhere in the cloud and pull it down when you need it. Then purge it from your computer.
SD cards are small and might pass if you are not su
Install Gentoo (Score:2)
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They will just lock you up a few weeks until their Gentoo-expert finds the time.
Remember the rubber hose attack (Score:2)
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allows them to compel you to hand over any passwords or encryption keys needed to access the data.
Step by step instructions (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Make one of these: https://hackaday.com/2015/10/1... [hackaday.com]
2) Hand everything over. Warn the bad guys that if they try to use your USB stick, it'll fry their computer.
3) When they fry their computer, ask if they have learned their lesson about taking you on your word.
4) Be cooperative. You already won the battle of wits, be a gracious winner.
5) Your data was on your obscure self-hosted webserver elsewhere in the first place.
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If you're on some list you basically already lost. You can play dumb if it's a random check, you boot up to some family pics and some pr0n in the browser history. But if you're a journalist suspected of having some shady contacts and information, you are the weak
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best case, you will be refused entry to the country, have what is the equivalent of a criminal record for travel terms where you now have to declare that refusal of entry and be royally fucked for the next decade where most countries will refuse you a travel visa.
More likely, they believe you, check the device (bel
Suicidal. (Score:2)
Survival 101.
Pissing off the border guard.
How the story ends if you "Ask Slashdot."
2) Hand everything over. Warn the bad guys that if they try to use your USB stick, it'll fry their computer.
3) When they fry their computer, ask if they have learned their lesson about taking you on your word.
4) Be cooperative. You already won the battle of wits, be a gracious winner.
How the story ends in the cinematic world.
[Anonymous basement interrogation room]
Wake up! I need you to be focused!
You either give me what I need or this switch will stay on until they turn the power off for lack of payment on the bill.
Which do you think cuts closer to the truth?
You may be compelled to decrypt it anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
Store nothing (Score:3)
Data is then sent via ssl. No other encryption software of any kind on the laptop.
Absolute minimum of services and a tiny hard drive, with no swap file/partition.
Reporters should only use a plain, single view, text editor that doesn't store parts of a working document to file, and can be made to direct send the data without ever touching the hard drive.
Two Man Control (Score:3)
And for the politically correct, social just warriors, etc. .. man in the sense of person
You carry a laptop, you carry a live boot USB stick/CD, You carry encrypted media, possibly the same as a boot USB. Your counterpart, possibly in another country, carries the decryption key. You carry his decryption key. Never cross an international border together.
These suggestions all suck, IMHO. (Score:2)
Personally, I'd perform a persistent install [of the distro of your choice] to a bootable MicroSD card. You can not only boot it up on virtually any PC, there are myriad ways you can throw them off or just plain fuck with them. Hell, really mess with their heads and lug around a laptop with Win9x on it (you don't even need all the drivers; present 'em with one huge fucking list of yellow exclamation marks in Device Manager!).
The bootable MicroSD card you can hide almost anywhere (up your nose, in a slit cut
easy (Score:2)
security tin a box (Score:2)
micro sd (Score:2)
Full Disk Encryption (Score:2)
With a really long passphrase with weird characters. They'll spend the rest of the natural lives waiting for it to be cracked.
Clear Out Files You Do Not Want Exposed (Score:2)
1. Backup the data files to a single backup file.
2. Encrypt the backup file using an OpenPGP application (e.g., PGP, Gnu Privacy Guard). Software should not have sensitive data so it does not need to be encrypted.
3. Upload the encrypted backup file to a cloud service whose servers are in a nation that will not respond to a police warrant from the nation whose police worry you.
4. Use a strong eraser application to erase the original files, the backup file, and the encrypted backup file on the l
Chromebook - two accounts - powerwash (Score:2)
If you have a Chromebook, have a separate gmail account that looks active (subscribe to some innocuous mailing lists.)
Prior to border simply powerwash the Chromebook and login with the clean account. Nothing to see here officer. The password is 1234.
After you get home, login with your normal account.
Don't you can be detained, use remote connections (Score:2)
Many countries in the world require the ability to search computers brought across the border. You can be detained if you fail to provide access such as passwords.
Do not take precious data with you. Leave the data safely at home and connect securely.
Use secure cloud storage or even secure storage back at home base and connect using a secure VPN.
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Unlike common criminals, try cooperating with the police. You'll be better off in the end for it generally.
What if the police have become criminals themselves?
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> Unlike common criminals, try cooperating with the police. You'll be better off in the end for it generally.
Sigh... Dont Talk to Police [youtube.com]
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That one is true even in budding fascism as the British now clearly have.
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Have you forgotten in the late 1930's the UK had the largest Nazi party outside of Germany?
And it's leader was a member of the royal family.
Yes I know there is a small difference between Nazism and Fascism.
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Unlike common criminals, try cooperating with the police. You'll be better off in the end for it generally.
Yeah, in this case I'd have to agree with you. According to the article, the police went to a judge and obtained a court order to get the information - so if you don't provide it, be prepared to sit in a jail cell until you change your mind.
I do think these laws are overreaching and need to be rewritten (and rescinded in some cases) - but the police were following the letter of the law here.
It's sad, but can you really trust them? (Score:2)
It's an unfortunate sign of the times, but I've read far too many articles about people being arrested and jailed for unknowingly violating the technicalities of various different laws.. consenting partners under 18 being jailed as sex offenders and being listed for life, insulting heads of state or reporting on human rights abuses, jailed for having cartoon porn / weird tentacle thing stuff from Japan that still gets branded as child pornography, or even for whistle-blowing. And particularly for America, r
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If you do not, then you are a "troublemaker" and will be treated just the same as a criminal. The police state is violently opposed to any and all resistance and the law does only support them, not you anymore.
Re: How about this... (Score:2)
I believe you are missing my point here as it appears others may have as well since I've been modded as a troll and someone else posted the "don't talk to police" thing. There is a difference between being polite and cooperative - good things - and volunteering information expecting the police to simply send you on your way, which can happen but is highly unlikely. I'm advocating the former. As in most aspects of life 'polite and cooperative' is generally the best policy, at least at the beginning of any co
Re: How about this... (Score:2)
Confronting the police by breaking laws in order to protest the laws is, at least in the US, a pointless excercise as the policy neither make the laws nor do they judge whether the laws are fair or even legal. The job of the police is to simple enforce laws that have been made. That is as true today as it was 50 years ago.
Re: How about this... (Score:2)
Boy I should have proof read that before posting. Several misspellings, but I believe you can get my point.
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The key is to have no way to decrypt the laptop, then they can't force you to. Make sure someone else has the key, preferably in another jurisdiction (i.e. country).
Re:Do we have to go through this again? (Score:5, Informative)
The key is to have no way to decrypt the laptop, then they can't force you to. Make sure someone else has the key, preferably in another jurisdiction (i.e. country).
That could land you in prison in the U.K. Legislation in that country required you to decrypt data for authorities on demand. Losing or destroying the keys is no excuse.
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Indeed. That British law is not about right or wrong, it is about enabling them to do it to you for daring to encrypt things they want.
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The police have to show that you have the key for there to be a prosecution. Otherwise they could just lock anyone up by demanding that they decrypt /dev/random. For safety you have should make sure you can prove that you don't have the key.
First of all, there's never any way you can prove you don't have a key. Period.
Secondly, I don't think you're correct about the law. I think the law requires you to be able to decrypt any encrypted data you have (/dev/random is not a file; it's a device), or any encrypted communications you have engaged in. My understanding is that it is effectively illegal in the U.K. to use communications protocols which employ perfect forward secrecy for that reason. (There are exceptions for some SSL web traffic, I t
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First of all, there's never any way you can prove you don't have a key. Period.
Nobody's proven that the Star Trek teleporter is impossible either, but if you were in New York and is charged with killing a man in San Francisco five minutes later you have a very strong alibi. Documented procedures that show you wouldn't be given the key and testimony saying the procedures were followed is as good as evidence gets in a court room. History can't be turned into a reproducible experiment, you only have the information that's been observed, recorded or might be gleamed from the leftovers. It
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The police have to show that you have the key for there to be a prosecution.
Unfortunately, these days they can just insist that you know the key, or claim that they know you know the key, and you'll probably sit in jail for quite some time before they let you out (if ever).
It's hard to prove you don't know something, especially if you've encrypted data that they want. Their reasoning (to the judge) will be, "Who would encrypt data without a way to decrypt it, your Honor?" and most judges will go "That makes sense."
And frankly, it does make sense. Why would someone encrypt their dat
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The onus is on them to prove you know it. So far the only times this has happened is when the person was accessing the data recently and they had proof, e.g. log files showing a recent mounting of the drive. If you can demonstrate that you set up a system where you made sure you didn't know the key, you should be okay.
You have to be careful to create evidence though, because e.g. just securely deleting the data by overwriting with random bytes could screw you. You can't unlock it, and you don't have proof i
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And frankly, it does make sense. Why would someone encrypt their data if they didn't have a way to decrypt it?
Who's to say it is encrypted data? I tend to do this to SSDs first thing I get them:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/XXX
The reason is partially to thwart compression schemes and make sure that the drive really can handle being full of uncompressible data, and partially to enter "worst case" write amplification as early as possible, so I know what the real worst-case speed of the drive is, and not get nasty surprises later
Of course, after that, any unpartitioned space on the drive will be indistinguishable from,
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Seems to be overkill.
It's probably better to have only sensitive stuff encrypted and hidden, that way it will be harder to determine if it contains interesting stuff. You may feed cops with some information, but only information that they essentially can figure out anyway.
Re:Securing your laptop? Only one way (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally use Windows EFS on my entire c:\user\myname folder, and that whole folder is backed up to a zero knowledge storage provider. I do this for my desktop and laptop.
Unless you save documents outside of that folder (which by default, 99% of all applications store it somewhere in that folder) then it's not likely to be retrievable.
AFAIK, Windows EFS uses AES-256 as a block cipher, with RSA-2048 or ECC-256 for key escrow (you can do up to RSA-16,384, or ECC-512.) AFAIK not even the NSA is able to crack either of those. The weakest link would be your password, with shorter passwords being easy to break (complexity, i.e. mix of case, special characters, numbers, isn't anywhere near as important as length) so use one that's 15 characters or longer.
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In management of secure information it is more appropriate to take a manageable series of secure step to ensure security of some of your data not necessarily all of you data and to try to prevent the to mixing.
So logically it makes sense to dual boot your device. A more active dual boot, so the normal boot is from built in storage with only as much security that you could be bothered with and the other boot is from portable media, preferably something very compact and secure, an encrypted memory card.
T
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Seems to be overkill.
Not really. Would you really take back a computer that the government hackers have had in their possession and then decrypt the data on it?
Re:Securing your laptop? Only one way (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reliable way to protect your data from government thugs is to change the government such that there are no government thugs wanting your data.
Anything else is a band-aid and temporary at best.
Strat.
Re:Securing your laptop? Only one way (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reliable way to protect your data from government thugs is to change the government such that there are no government thugs wanting your data.
Anything else is a band-aid and temporary at best.
Strat.
That is the final step in the process.
Step one is getting people to realize there's a problem.
And that's why journalists need to have their information protected, and that's why the goons want to get their hands on it.
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That is the final step in the process.
I can think of a few steps that are even more final than that...
I'm not elucidating, due to the fifth amendment to the constitution.
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That's actually a key concept and also a key reason for keeping government as decentralized and local as possible. The more concentrated & centralized government power is, the quicker it falls to corruption and outright despotism and tyranny.
That was also one of the reasons the US Constitution was written so as to allow the central government only a few
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1. (Most stupid proposal so far): That will fail by a simple look-up of the HDD serial number which the HDD reports via SMART command.
2. Ever heard of x-rays? You know, like they use in airports?
3. Lots and lots of forensic tools that can detect that.
4. Uh huh. About as obvious as just ssh-ing to your remote server. Nothing gained at all.
5. Again, x-rays.
6. An have that friend go to jail as a "data mule" instead. Only good piece of advice in here. Utterly immoral though.
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Yes, it's possible to find MicroSDs -- if you do a full-up fine-tooth-comb search. Which takes hours and pretty much destroys everything in its path. If you've really pissed off the Powers That Be, they might. Then again, they've probably done the same thing to your office, home, car, and anything else you've been near recently anyway so why start worrying at the airport?
Otherwise, the major danger is that your brand-new Alienware machine looks like it would be better off in someone else's collection and
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... if it is not possible for you to memorize what you can, you may suddenly have entered an alternate dimension.