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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.
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?
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.