When you get right down to it, the best way for an attacker to get hold of your data is to shut the box down, pull the drive, and rip a sector-by-sector image to analyze offsite. It might not be quick (depending on the speed of the hard drive, speed of the storage drive, and a number of other factors) but if you're not there when it's done you might not know that it ever happened. However, if you encrypt data at the level of the drive, they can copy the drive all they want but they won't be able …

UPDATE - 20170327 - Truecrypt was disconnected in 2014.ev when Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP.  DO NOT USE IT.  This blog post must be considered historical in nature.

If you've been following the news media for the past year or so, stores have been cropping up with frightening regularity about travelers who are detained at the border while customs agents demand the login credentials for their notebook computers so that they can be examined for gods-know-what kind of information. From time to time, the hard drives of computers are actually imaged for later analysis. As if that weren't enough, the United …

It's been an interesting weekend, to be sure.. Lyssa and I have been in the market for a couple of things lately, namely a bookcase or media shelf of some kind that we can migrate our DVD collection to, and ring binders that we can move our CD collections into while we rip and encode everything. So, to that end, we spent Saturday driving around searching for stuff along those lines. In two days, we didn't find any bookcases anywhere we looked (well, that's not entirely true, I did find one bookcase, a floor model at OfficeMax, but the construction …