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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.)
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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
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?
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.".
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).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
> Unlike common criminals, try cooperating with the police. You'll be better off in the end for it generally.
Sigh... Dont Talk to Police
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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...
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.
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?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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.
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.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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'
The parent organisation should maintain a networked data store that all it's reporters have a write only password for.
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.
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 think, but I could be wrong.) I'm not a lawyer though, so I could be wrong about my second point.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
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.
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 data if they didn't have a way to decrypt it?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.
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, say, a truecrypt unpartition. But I sure can't decrypt it, because it doesn't have encrypted data on it. Probably.
Buy a laptop with an SD card slot. Put all files other than OS and some games on the SD card. Hide the SD card inside your luggage handle when passing through security. Or FedEx it to your destination. Encrypt if excessively paranoid. The stock SD card slot won't generate excessive interest, they won't even know to look for or expect it. If you are overly concerned, use a micro-SD card in an adapter, leave the adapter in your slot, but hide the micro card anywhere, slipped behind the tag in your underwear would survive a strip search.
If you don't have an SD card slot, take two mirrored HDs outbound, and send the used one back while installing the "spare" for the return trip.
Hiding the data is better than encryption. Encryption is easy to break if you have the person with the key in a locked room and a $5 wrench (well, 5 quid spanner, for the UK).0
Learn to love Alaska
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 limited powers and keep as much of the governing affecting individuals as local and accountable as possible.
Sadly, the US has over the last ~100 years, moved away from decentralized and accountable governance to become a top-down, centralized-power, crony-capitalist fascist surveillance-state oligarchy.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.