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UK Police Want Plug-In Computer Crime Detectors
An anonymous reader writes "UK police are talking to private companies about using plug-in USB devices that can scour the hard drive of any device they are attached to, searching for evidence of illegal activity. The UK's Association of Chief Police Officers is considering using commercial devices that can perform targeted searches of text, pictures and computer code on hard drives, allowing untrained cops to detect anything from correspondence on stolen goods to child pornography. Police in the UK are desperate for a way of slashing the backlog of machines seized by the police in raids, with many forces having a backlog that will take a year to process." Maybe they shouldn't seize so many computers.
this is probably something everybody should have, just to make sure they're in compliance.
This should be easy to accomplish in the UK where citizens are required by law to turn over all their encryption keys or face jail time. It would be harder to make it work in the US, where people can use encryption. I suppose the Brits could employ TrueCrypt hidden volumes to keep their stuff private.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Now instead of having trained forensic experts, we'll have common beat cops searching your computer.
Attorney: How do you know he had illegal material on his computer?
Officer: I pushed the button, and the computer told me to arrest him.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
TrueCrypt
The police MUST pay compensation to owners of seized computers proportional to the amount of time they hold the computers, which must come from the police officers themselves rather than the public purse. Otherwise there will be no incentive to return equipment promptly.
Right. Do they want a pony with that? I work as a form of a basic computer technician at my college, doing basic maintenance of students computers (mostly telling them to uninstall limewire, install AV, and fixing their machines ones they break them, software wise), and let me tell you that no automated tool has yet to make my job easier. The moment criminals figure out what the cops are looking for, they'll do something different. Maybe encrypt the data in tiny containers designed to look like corrupted files, or just simply wipe incriminating evidence. But, the UK government does seem to have a record of ignoring practicality and citizen rights (although not this time) in the name of "continuing peace and stability."
There's nothing wrong with the government using whatever technology they has at their disposal to search computers they have legally seized. That they haven't been using such technology up to now is baffling.
So, are they saying that they want existing forensics software, with a drool-proof wizard attached, bootable from a flash drive(because hell, who needs forensic hardware write blocking when you can totally trust software to do the job under any circumstance?) or are they actually proposing that the program be able to detect evil?
I think the UK Police got this idea while watching CSI.
Remember to wire USB pins to secret kill-switch designed to dump excessive current into said USB device.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
I'm not much in the ways of encryption, but I assume if your computer's encrypted it'll be pretty difficult for this thing to work through the system, if not impossible.
Sounds like the cops just want a usb key that has a light that comes on when the law's been broken.
Mainstream computer illiteracy at work.
And that was the last Terry Fox run I ever participated in.
Anybody want to sponsor a contest to see who can write a USB driver that defeats this within the fewest lines of code?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
that'll probably work fine for the lay-man, but will having an encrypted hard drive count as evidence of illegal activity
Then there will be no problems with this technology!
something like this can easily be averted. VMs, incompatible OSs, dual boots, jailbroken iPod Touchs, root kits, etc.. It's like The Great Firewall of China, sure it looks good on paper, but anyone knowledgable enough can break it.
I would agree with you as long as the workings of these devices are totally transparent to the public. That would have to include open source for all of the S/W and algorithms used to determine what material is evidence of illegal activity. If it's not transparent, then they could claim that anyone's computer shows evidence of illegal activity and there would be no way to defend against it.
I'd feel real safe walking the streets of Manchester knowing the police had USB devices to stop the criminals.
NOT.
OK. We can go over this topic again.
These cops seem extremely lazy we don't want to do our work we want someone to write a computer to do it for us. Even if someone does manage this for them I would be curious to see how an automated usb drive will deal with compressed zip files and encrypted files.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
I can just imagine the headline /. or whatever news website ten years from now: UK Govt bans Human Reproduction. Now all future UK citizens will produced in laboratories by private companies with Government oversight. This is due to the fact that UK Government can remove all Genes that will allow the human nature to want to see child pornography. Also in future citizen models they eliminate all crime and the ability to make free choice decisions. A UK Govt official was quoted saying "Now everyone in UK is safe because it is impossible to commit a crime."
*cough brave new world*
I say all of this because it seems like the UK is leading Western Society in destroying its citizens privacy and civil rights.
Oh well, at least here in the states we have the constitution to provide to certain "inalienable" rights. Oh wait, The US Govt ignores the Constitution? /end_rant
Live Free
If I understand the British government, they wouldn't have any problems with this approach either:
Let's build a live USB Linux load that knows how to read and write all known file systems including encrypted systems. Then we will write a few handy scripts that will scan for a fairly long list of known files using MD5sum or some such. Then, if it doesn't turn anything up, copy some child porn from the USB drive over to the target system and print out the arrest warrant.
It's called COFEE
Cops got even got their own web portal courtesy of Microsoft.
i'm sure this will work wonders with a laptop running full volume crypto.
lawl!
That was not a long ago: pandemic of malware that spreaded on usb dongles...
As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.
Maybe they shouldn't seize so many computers.
As someone working in Digital Forensics in the UK I can honestly say that this is the most inspired piece of wisdom I have seen in a long time. Our company has literally had computers that haven't been switched on in a decade that have been sitting in a garage or attic until the cops decide to seize them. This is good for business but bad for taxpayer expenditure and the expedient discovery of data of evidential worth. The process for seizure of computer equipment in police investigations is essentially "if it has an on-off switch then seize it". There needs to be some training given to officers seizing although I doubt they will as they are scared of the first case of non-seized items containing illicit material.
UK police are talking to private companies about using plug-in USB devices that can scour the hard drive of any device they are attached to
I've got a rackmount OpenBSD box that claims otherwise.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why has noone pointed out that these devices are using security holes to gain access and that these holes are being or should be blocked on most OS'es. It's probably just a matter of time before they will need a different ploy anyways.
A simple web-search turns up a tonn of comercial solutions already.
Many companys already require usb security suits to be installed on all company computers.
In the meantime disabeling drivers and locking down the policys required to re-enable (in windows that is) might be one way.
Why not have an EU-wide mandate of a computer bill of rights? In this include the right to encryption and the right to keep your key to yourself.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"...allowing untrained cops to detect anything from correspondence on stolen goods to child pornography. Police in the UK are desperate for a way of slashing the backlog of machines seized by the police in raids..."
How about investing more into proper trained cops? How about better education? That might help a bit... together with "Maybe they shouldn't seize so many computers".
maybe more people should own PCs in the UK...it will be better in the long run for civil liberties.
Especially those people who are more likely to get things seized in a police raid.
The purpose, to increase the backlog so much that the police will rethink their policy of seizing computers.
That, and it'll help local computer shop owners with a flood of business as by the time the people get their computers back, it will be obsolete that they would have to buy a new one...essentially paid for by the police department.
Talk about a stimulus plan.
For the small fee of, say, £10000 I can get the UK what they need. I will provide them with an empty USB memory, and a letter explaining that what they are looking for can't be done. At least not if the suspected computer criminal is any good: the files can be encrypted, stored inside an encrypted ZIP-file, hidden inside a hidden encrypted partition on the hard drive. If that level of secrecy is not enough, the child porn pictures can be steganographically hidden inside other (completely innocent) pictures (or inside MP3 files for a bit of variation), and unless you know they are there you are utterly unlikely to ever find them...
I wonder how long it will take the authorities to realise that "theft" or "possesion of illegal goods" in the computer world are very different to "theft" and "possesion of illegal goods" in the physical world. If you have a stolen item in your house, hiding it in such a way that a thorough search does not find it is hard. Hiding a "stolen" file on a modern computer is not trivial, but it can be done if you have the knowledge. And this knowledge is not hard to find.
So, as usual, they are asking for an solution that is impossible to implement, at least in any meaningfully reliable way. I mean, how does one sanely "detect" child pornography or any other illegal content to begin with?
Despite these insurmountable odds, I am fairly certain that there will be a long line of companies willing to try and do some half-assed gadgets, because there will be lots of money involved.
[Warning] Bittorent Client detected! Possible Crime level - High
Book 'em Danno!
and it will work as long as there is something of interest on sais\d target. By interest I mean corporate secrets from a competing company that happens to fund the election bankroll of a politician. Smoke and mirrors nothing more nothing less.
Easy enough for qualified personnel to defeat (along with the BIOS-level HDD password protection? Probably). That is, the nerd back at the police lab - not the PD's street soldiers.
Go ahead - give 'em a hacker tool on a stick. Let 'em feel like they're technically competent to conduct field investigations into an area which I'll wager most of them don't even remotely understand. Oh, and let me raise questions at trial into the safeguards in place to prevent officers from inadvertantly/intentionally corrupting the contents of the filesystems they intend to investigate in the field.
(I'm assuming their hacker's tool can automagically recognize and search ext3, ext4, jfs, ufs, xfs, reiserfs, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, etc. . . . and let us not forget software-based filesystem encryption for many of the aforementioned filesystems).
How would a USB device get access to the host system's drives?
Surely that would require drivers to be loaded on the host...
Not only would this be very OS specific, but it could easily be defeated, you could configure the host to detect the insertion of this particular type of usb device and perform a secure overwrite of all your incriminating files when such a device is inserted.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I'm having a hard time understanding how they intend to automate these things. Okay, documents presumably you can scan for keywords. Of course, if the list of keywords ever gets out (government never leaks anything, right?), that becomes pointless. But pictures? How do you automate scanning pictures for illegal material? File name is not useful (rename?). MD5 Hash? All we need to do is toggle one random bit of the file and the hash value is completely different (that is an attribute of a good hash). And where would they get the hash values in the first place? This sounds like yet another request by the technically clueless. Wish I lived in the UK. There's probably a nice big pot of Sterling waiting to be doled out by those clueless folks.
linquendum tondere
In the old days, everything ran on separate ports. Remote control had a port, file transfer had a port, Chat had a port.
Cause: Firewalls began blocking those ports to block the applications so users couldn't use them.
Effect: Today, this all runs on port 443. GotoMyPC, file sharing sites, most chat programs work on port 443.
The effect of this would be for users to move their data encrypted and online, into some other country that they can trust will not divulge the information when asked. Launch my client, provide my key, and map a drive over 443 to my data.
You take my PC, the data is not there. You break into my home and plug into my PC when I'm gone, the data's not going to be available. You somehow get the data from the host you have to spend a long time brute forcing the password.
Of course, they will then load up a fake root key onto my PC and man in the middle attack me, but one step at a time..
What about devices that can't boot from USB or whose password-protected BIOSes have boot from hard drive prioritized higher than boot from USB?
Far more realistic is a set of tools:
* For computers that need to be left on, a method to transport the computer without disrupting the electrical or network connections.
* For other computers, a means to quickly copy the data from the drives.
* For computers that can be booted with another media like a floppy, cdrom, or USB, you win.
For computers that can't be booted and whose BIOS cannot be altered to boot from one of those devices, you need to be able to unscrew the case, unplug the hard drive, then either boot from another device if you can then plug the hard disk into an external USB adapter so you can hot-plug it for read access. If that doesn't work, plug the hard disk into your portable computer's USB port for reading.
All in all the safest thing to do if you don't need the machine to stay powered on is to turn it off and take it into a forensic lab and pull the data using established, court-recognized procedures.
For forensic purposes make damn sure you never write to the drive and that you can prove that you did not write to the drive.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You are all now living in The Village.
You have a choice.
You can be numbers, or you can be free men and women.
The choice is yours.
Choose wisely.
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Might be technically possible if Windows is running. Not a chance it'll work on a linux box.
The real problem is writing the OOXML parser.
No sig today...
That raises an interesting point, though - as soon as a police officer plugs a USB stick in to a suspect's computer, the computer surely stops being an untouched "forensic scene", and so anything on it becomes inadmissable in court? We've had speed detectors being chalenged in court, how long after these are used in the wild before they are challenged, too? The "USB stick" would have to be a read-only, use once item so that it could be used for one crime scene only to find probable cause, then bagged and stored to be presented as evidence later - if it was a standard USB stick then ANYTHING could have been on it when the police officer stuck it in to your computer.
I was once the sysadmin for a public high school. The Web design teacher was an idiot who thought she was an independent entity from the school district. She once called me screaming, so the assistant sysadmin went up there to check on it. She held up the wireless presenter's Bluetooth dongle and screamed "The district is spying on me!"; he had to calmly point out to her that it was actually a Bluetooth dongle for the wireless presenter that she had bought not too long ago.
I considered telling her "We don't need that to spy on you. We can watch your screen with Altiris, examine your home directory at \\server\users\username, and even your local hard drive at \\computername\c$". Maybe I should have said that--I'd love to see her wrap her workstation with tinfoil.
Well I hope the PC's know which PC's to plug the detector into, or it could get painful ;-) Or are the PC's helmet's getting a USB upgrade?
It is evil to disown your kids and leave family fortune to cats. But it is not illegal.
It is evil to kick a man out into the street with no compensation after 30 years of service to the company - but it is not illegal.
On the other hand - in most countries it is illegal to make a backup copy of the CD/DVD you bought legally. Or download one from the internet without buying it again.
So not only must this magical tool be able to recognize any and all illegal media (from downloaded music to drawings depicting sex with minors) - it must also have instant access to, and understanding of every single law in the land.
Now, unless they manage somehow to create an actual AI (even a limited one that would only comprehend matters of law) - I don't see this happening.
On a positive(?) side, if they ever do create something like that, most crimes would not need an actual trial.
Just have the police officer plug in the connector to the computer, have it read out the sentence, and escort the "criminal" to the jail.
If that ever happens I strongly suggest investing into cement factories, lower and medium quality steel and rough textiles cause there will be a serious lack of prison space and uniforms.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Create a small pseudo random number generator that connects to sata0. They start scanning. They learn about the "halting problem"
Basically I feel that if the police confiscate some item as potential evidence, then they need to examine it in an expedited way. They should never just be allowed to shove something in a warehouse to get to at some undetermined future date! Justice delayed is justice denied (William Gladstone, British politician).
What a shame that my computer is "broken" and sends a 240V blast through its USB ports...
I'll just create a non-zero-length empty file, format it to some obscure file system, add everything suspicious to it then .tar.bz2 it and place it in an obscure location on my Ext4 / partition.
If they can get that then I want a pony.
How do you think computer forensics happen currently? They copy your drives. Sure, the computers they use could contaminate your drive but that's a risk for all forensics, be it DNA / fingerprint / whatever.
The point is that the forensic science service would be using a standard bit of kit so, if you knew your computer didn't have whatever they found on it, examining the kit they used and claiming contamination would be a defence option open to you.
Nick
US TSA has been using these since last year to copy my hidden TrueCrypt file containers every time I go through airport security. So far so good.
...all it takes is to load up some FM onto the USB device.
*FM = "Fucking Magic"
and I never previously new there was a need for the circuit that dumps 10000 volts into the USB port unless disabled by the right software action.
How about investing more into proper trained cops? How about better education?
Cops receiving official training as computer forensics are no longer simple beat cops - they are computer forensics experts and they should be treated and paid as such.
So, besides their police training they would probably require something equivalent to a BA/BS.
And even if there was enough time and money to educate and pay them later - system needs its beat cops too. Not just highly trained computer forensics.
What they would like to have is a "breathalyser-style tool for computers that could instantly flag up illegal activity on any PC it's attached to".
Which is delusional, even when you limit it to "a simple tool to preview on site and identify there's that one email [they] are looking for [so they] can then use that and interview the person now, rather then waiting six to 12 months for the evidence to come back" in cases such as "credit card fraud or selling stolen goods online".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
In other news, daemons were driven from a pig in Gloucester. Apparently a local farmer mistook it for a dead badger...
Gets rid of all those nasty attempts to break in. Sometimes will get rid of nasty Bobbies. Make sure you put a little lightning sticker near the port so you can say, "Well, it was marked as power, but the gent plugged it in there anyway and started a cool light show. I assumed he knew what he was doing."
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
How about a USB key set up to detect and remove zombies / open-relay / spam junk / malware, FTP install system updates and security patches, and do general system hardening on my friends & co-workers PCs in a hands-free fashion? Just plug in, let it zap the badness away while I have a coffee, then charge them $50 for the housecall.
If your computer was virusfree before it may not longer be afterwards....
Can I arrest that thug?
Computer says no!
It's not just child porn that's illegal to possess in the UK now. I'd be curious to know if their device would handle so-called "extreme" adult images - given that the law is so vaguely worded that neither the police (also here) nor the Crown Prosecution Service have a clue what should be illegal to possess under the law, I'd be curious to see how a USB device can do the job...
...as if there weren't enough already.
You can bet this thing will entirely operate on the presumption that every PC runs windows.
They still have crime in the UK?
I thought they eliminated all crime with all their surveillance cameras, and speed cameras etc.
Surely they must do more to fight crime.
Perhaps mandatory random strip searches, home inspections, unfettered police access to citizens residences and possessions for examination for criminal activity.
Or increase the penalties for all crimes to bankrupt jaywalkers, and incarcerate speeders for life.
This UK government is too lax. They need to begin to take charge and control and monitor the population better.
They should arrest/execute citizens before a crime occurs. That should be the goal.
I'd also like to see a return to search warrants being just that - search warrants. The police can look all they like, but if the Government wants to steal all the electronic equipment that a person owns without compensation or guarantee it will be returned anytime soon, or in working order, it can pass a new law, and then require that police obtain specific seizure warrants. I suspect that the only reason the public tolerate this is because most people still have this idea that a search warrant means just what it says - a search.
Giving compensation should go without saying, I agree - I don't even care if it comes from public money, at least then the cost is spread (and the Government have to justify the increased taxes), rather than the risk of being the unlucky one who loses all access to the Internet, my personal documents, photographs, emails, and perhaps my livelihood, for an unknown amount of time, with not a penny of compensation.
I would also add that if they have a backlog, WTF are they stealing yet more computers? Finish with the ones they have.
Mostly, I'm glad that I keep all my bestiality and S&M in the cloud. The snuff films, too. No point in having that stuff on my hard drive, where the cops can find it. It's all filed in my Gmail account, in the folder below my "Homeland Surveillance spy stuff". No one will EVER think of looking online!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The Expenses scandal has already claimed Jacki Smith (Home Secretary aka Minister of Justice), and Brown and the Labour Party will be massacred by the electorate at the polls.
Keep it all on various web hosting services with encryption and steganography, and use a ubuntu livecd to access it, so no permanent evidence that you have any online data ever exists. For bonus points, keep a folder on your actual hard drive called "Child Porn" and fill it with screenshots of naked children in Disney movies.
for later interpretation by computer experts
The summary describes a tool that will also interpret the evidence found.
What COFEE will do for you is to gather volatile information on life windows systems like running processes, open network connections, system date and time, RAM contents etc. The disk contents are not acquired as they will supposedly remain as they are.
In contrast to this the tool the summary mentions should not acquire any evidence but instead search through existing evidence and interpret it, like searching through your harddrive for keywords on a bad word list or searching for hashes of known kiddypr0n etc.
There is a big difference there:
If Microsoft's tool is the equivalent of a toolkit designed to help a cop take a sample of your blood for later testing of anything illegal in your blood that will not be there anymore several hours later when a doctor will do the same, the tool described in the summary is the equivalent of a tool designed to tell the cop if there is anything illegal in your blood without acquiring the blood for later analysis by an expert.
Although this is quite a bad analogy as the device in my analogy might well be technically feasibly. Let's instead consider the following analogy:
Instead of using a camera in order to take pictures of a suspected crime scene they want to use a device similar to a camera that instead of acquiring evidence from suspected crime scenes will allow a cop to look through it at any scene in order to see if a crime has happened at all.
Imagine a cop on the open street looking through a camera at you and then getting arrested because the camera told him that you somehow supposedly committed a crime.
Who doesn't want a magic wand?
Why don't they just surgically implant USB ports into the brainstems of every man woman and child in the UK, you know just in case they were THINKING about child porn or terrorism.... second thought, maybe it should be esata instead
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
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They need firewire.
... would be to put a portrait of the Prime Minister in every home which has a small spy-cam installed.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
Grep "porn"
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MS is advertising that Windows has a backdoor now??!
I really don't see how else 'plug in USB device and collect live data' can be interpreted.
Here is my urgent advice for Linux users:
sudo apt-get remove w32codecs w64codecs silverlight msttcorefonts
Dumb Officer: "Captain, this computa doesn't appear to have a USB port?" Even Dumber Officer (Captain) : "Sure it does, I see two in the front. Just use a hammer and tap it in" Dumb Officer: "Derrrr, okay"
Wouldn't the 'owner' (SID) of the file be incorrect for someone writing files onto, say an NTFS volume from a Linux USB key?
What I want is a gizmo inside my PC that will detect rogue spy-USB devices and give 'em the ol' Tesla....
With EU human rights laws and my rights not to incriminate myself and the fact my HD is sector encrypted. :)
And after they are done collecting personal information from your laptop, they will forget the USB stick on a bus and, next thing you know, your identity will be sold on eBay.
I can't remember it therefore it PROVES I've forgotten it.
If I'd not forgotten it, I would be able to remember it.
Duh.
OMG NO! It's The Bottom Inspectors! Quick! Hide the children!!!1
Co-operation beats competition
How about we get around to changing that to "Innocent UNLESS proven guilty"...
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
..where did I put that? *rummage* *rummage*.. Ah, here it is..
http://www.kashat.net/unregistered.html
UK police are asking for a "breathalyser"-style tool for computers that could instantly flag up illegal activity on any PC it is attached to.
Detective Superintendent Charlie McMurdie, who is what passes for a computer expert in the police force, said such a tool could run on suspects' machines, instantly read and analyse their email, web browsing and chat logs, identify credit card fraud or selling stolen goods online, reliably detect and assess images containing children on the five-level child porn scale and create a handy log of relevant evidence. And a pony.
"It's surely just a simple matter of programming," said McMurdie. "We're seizing so many computers from people with a copy of Virgin Killer that frontline police need a digital forensic tool as easy to use as the breathalyser, to magically flash up 'HONEST UPSTANDING CITIZEN' or ''E'S A NONCE, GUV'. Do we need to seize five computers, all their mobile phones, their CD and DVD collection and basically everything that runs on electricity, or could we use a magical police gadget with impressive flashy lights and stuff? I thought computers were supposed to make life easier!"
The eventual development of such a tool could help ease a backlog of digital forensic work that has officers waiting up to a year for evidence to be recovered from seized machines, though threatening to destroy people's livelihoods has proven very efficient in extracting confessions.
EDS Capita Goatse have promised they can "absolutely, definitely, certainly, probably" produce such a tool with only an ironclad GBP100m five year contract, and also reliably determine whether a computer program halts or not. The Internet Watch Foundation also demanded to be involved, and were told their details would be kept on file.
"It was so much simpler in the old days," sighed McMurdie. "People asking you what time it was, burglars with domino masks and striped jumpers and bags marked 'SWAG,' chirpy Cockney sparrow second-hand car dealers wiv a heart of gold ... you just can't get the wood, you know."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Sorry for the shameless promotion, but some forensic specialist may want to know that Guardware sells a USB tool that scans drives looking for pornographic images and verbiage on any drive. http://www.guardware.com/ts_overview.php
We have reached a point in time where beat cops are becoming cumbersome and obsolete.
I have this "top secret" system I developed that is production ready and I'm willing to let it go for 10% cheaper. It will also boot from a cd and then run a file from usb (or wherever you want to run it from)and they can enter any crime terms they want to find "hidden" things in text files etc....Whats this awesome system you ask? It's a Linux Live CD and a copy of grep or egrep and ls...What a revelation. Why don't they just have an actual CS guy on the payroll that knows what he is doing. Might save millions.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Just make this a required feature: OP
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
which gives a very bad shock when someone plugs in something.
This is exactly why I have a partition created by trucrpt randomly written over.
Yes, it looks like a 'hidden' partition. It's on the large size - 120GB. It's obvious. No, I can't unlock it. There's nothing to 'unlock'.
Just waiting for the day that WILL come where they will say 'you have other stuff, this must be a hidden partition, tell us the key' 'no' 'okay, jail for you while we break this stash'.
I wonder how long it is going to take them to find 1. my blog or 2. the source code to the c program I wrote to randomly overwrite the partition (taking care to really mess up the header).
CAPTCHA: forgets