Law enforcement can get a court order requiring you to surrender all passwords, so they might as well all be the same. You are required to legally comply or they get you for obstructing justice in addition to whatever else you are going to likely be convicted of(which certainly, they already have some 'evidence' against you). So encrypting disks and all of that other bunk may be great at preventing your work from being stolen by a competitor, but not so useful against the man.
The only real protection here is if you use something like TrueCrypt and can actually obscure filesystems, or make relevant data/folders look like junk. If they do not know you store the data in that file then as long as it's not named "stolen documents" you're probably ok. Some of the methods used by TC would probably fall victim to a good sector editor, but if they don't know they're there they probably aren't looking.
Let's recap why this guy became a suspect:
1) Speaking on the phone to a person who has been the subject of several government shit storms due to being public and controversial. (He is nearly always watched, recorded, or whatever.)
2) Keeping stolen documents on a computer in your work area/possession for no reason. If they were disposed of after use then there would be nothing to recover especially if you used a tool like BCWipe or something else that wipes with random noise.
3) Using tools like wget are not discrete. The network engineers just had a heart attack the minute this goof started beating the crap out of every server they had. They would have easily had IP's and access times because all the military clocks are synced up. All they'd have to do is figure out what IP was accessing and what station -- and sure as hell they knew who was doing this. It's very easy to log sessions with firewalls and network intrusion detection systems, and the military no doubt logs almost everything.
So basically, I think despite what he did.. He was sloppy, and amateurish and that's why he got caught... Even though I respect his ideals his methods are joke.
The number one reason anyone open sources anything is to get a community to support and develop the software. The more niche or unique your idea is here the better. If your business is selling hardware you don't care if you make money on the software because that's not what you sell. You sell boxes, not applications. That will give you street cred, and make you look benevolent especially if you back port user hacks and features into your main line code base (and your resulting devices). If you are a software company you simply cannot afford to do this -- your business is selling your bytes of code and not iron. Your edge is your software, data, engineering, and the like... You cannot give these away for free if your develop software for profit... Google does NOT sell software they sell advertising, and thus can give as much away as they like -- their edge is in being a market leading ad conduit. They can give all their software away and it would barely effect their bottom line because the marketing rep is what makes the money for them.
I can give all the software I want if I am predominately a marketing company; I just can't give away free marketing.:) Thus, being in the software business stinks.. as you cannot be open source in it and stay alive. Whatever you plan to develop launch your business in that field and make your software for that cause -- then it doesn't matter if you give it away... because software is not your business...Otherwise, just keep it closed.. and profit.:)
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Law enforcement can get a court order requiring you to surrender all passwords, so they might as well all be the same. You are required to legally comply or they get you for obstructing justice in addition to whatever else you are going to likely be convicted of(which certainly, they already have some 'evidence' against you). So encrypting disks and all of that other bunk may be great at preventing your work from being stolen by a competitor, but not so useful against the man. The only real protection here is if you use something like TrueCrypt and can actually obscure filesystems, or make relevant data/folders look like junk. If they do not know you store the data in that file then as long as it's not named "stolen documents" you're probably ok. Some of the methods used by TC would probably fall victim to a good sector editor, but if they don't know they're there they probably aren't looking. Let's recap why this guy became a suspect: 1) Speaking on the phone to a person who has been the subject of several government shit storms due to being public and controversial. (He is nearly always watched, recorded, or whatever.) 2) Keeping stolen documents on a computer in your work area/possession for no reason. If they were disposed of after use then there would be nothing to recover especially if you used a tool like BCWipe or something else that wipes with random noise. 3) Using tools like wget are not discrete. The network engineers just had a heart attack the minute this goof started beating the crap out of every server they had. They would have easily had IP's and access times because all the military clocks are synced up. All they'd have to do is figure out what IP was accessing and what station -- and sure as hell they knew who was doing this. It's very easy to log sessions with firewalls and network intrusion detection systems, and the military no doubt logs almost everything. So basically, I think despite what he did.. He was sloppy, and amateurish and that's why he got caught... Even though I respect his ideals his methods are joke.
The number one reason anyone open sources anything is to get a community to support and develop the software. The more niche or unique your idea is here the better. If your business is selling hardware you don't care if you make money on the software because that's not what you sell. You sell boxes, not applications. That will give you street cred, and make you look benevolent especially if you back port user hacks and features into your main line code base (and your resulting devices). If you are a software company you simply cannot afford to do this -- your business is selling your bytes of code and not iron. Your edge is your software, data, engineering, and the like... You cannot give these away for free if your develop software for profit... Google does NOT sell software they sell advertising, and thus can give as much away as they like -- their edge is in being a market leading ad conduit. They can give all their software away and it would barely effect their bottom line because the marketing rep is what makes the money for them. I can give all the software I want if I am predominately a marketing company; I just can't give away free marketing. :) Thus, being in the software business stinks.. as you cannot be open source in it and stay alive. Whatever you plan to develop launch your business in that field and make your software for that cause -- then it doesn't matter if you give it away... because software is not your business...Otherwise, just keep it closed.. and profit. :)