storage privacy (was: Nice quiet, private, anonymous life??)

Alexander W. Janssen alexander.janssen at gmail.com
Tue Dec 4 21:13:08 UTC 2007


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mark485anderson at eml.cc schrieb:
> Judge: "Ok you are to be held in contempt and in jail xyz, until such
> time as you give us the pass phrase to your data"

Only a matter of the UK at the moment. Bad enough though.

> Most data overwrite programs take too long-you do not have that time
> when they are knocking down your door.

That's were strong encryption might work, along with enough entropy to
claim that this is random data, and not just encrypted files. I heard,
but haven't checked myself, that the "truecrypt"-suite offers something
meeting this requirements.

> A strong magnetic field close to the hard drive will completely destroy
> the data making it impossible to recover. I will also probably fuckup
> the drive mechanism, rendering the drive useless. Someone said consumer
> demagnetizers were not sufficently strong? How do you know this?

Come on, that's just a idea directly from the game "Uplink". You know
any of those "movie-grade"-demagnetisers? You might want to check
Powerlab's can-crusher[1] though, just for the fun of it ;-)

> I have not run a tor server, so I do not know the exact requirements.
> Can it be done from a ram drive?

It could, but you'd need to make sure it doesn't swap/page down to disk,
which would be bad.

> Explosives and incendiaries are a poor choice for obvious reasons. Want
> to add arson and terrorism to your charges?

I don't think is was meant to be serious...

> I am not saying magnetism is the only way or even the best way, but a
> way, assuming you have recent backups at an undisclosed, secure
> location.

It's the Star Trek way. Go for strong encryption. Everything else is
"The Science of 24". ("As seen on National TV!")

Alex.

[1] http://www.powerlabs.org/pssecc.htm
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