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Ask Slashdot: Securing a Journalist's Laptop Against a Police Search?
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.)
Whatever kind of encryption you use should have the ability to use alternative passwords - an unlimited number of them. So enter password (A) reveals your tax records, password (B) gets pictures of naked 30 year old men. But enter password (C) and you get clear pictures of Mr. Cameron violating a dead pig. When they demand your password, give them password A. If they get all torture-ish you give them password B.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You could use one of these...
1) Make one of these: https://hackaday.com/2015/10/1...
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.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Back when I was at Kazaa many years ago, I kept all my files in a BestCrypt-encrypted drive, and all sensitive emails were PGP-encrypted. I was feeling pleased - if anyone got hold of my computer, there was nothing to see. But then one day our office was raided in a search discovery order, and all that time spent encrypting things came to naught, if I refused to hand over anything it would have been contempt of court. And so I printed out thousands of emails in one long continuous unformatted strip... that was about as far as I could go. I did consider that I could have gone one step further and used BestCrypt's feature that lets you create an encrypted drive that's actually two partitions - give out one key and all you see is nice set of clean files, plus a whole lot of random bytes. It's something to consider, but you're living dangerously if it's a court order. BTW, there's discussion here about keeping data in the cloud - another tempting option. Broadly the law can compel you to hand over any data "In your control or possession", where possession is defined as including the means to retrieve remote data. So there would need to be zero knowledge of having that remote data at all. Just sayin'