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Are they really that paranoid? Imagine some computer newbie bought a disk via eBay, and the former owner had wiped it. The new owner did not partition and format it yet. Guilty until proven innocent?
Yeah, that's the way it works in these cases, guilty unless you have a very good lawyer.
Either way it's a very good idea to keep everything encrypted, except mundane things. Really, just keep everything encrypted to be safe. However, they have been known to force people to give the encryption key, and if they suspected that something was on the drive, you are guilty if you don't give the encryption key ... and if you don't as well. Welcome to the USSA.
If you use strong encryption+steganography with a very high signal to noise ratio, using high resolution jpeg formats or mpg4 as data supports... there is NO WAY the "professional snoops" will try to bother you...
Immagine I carry in my disk a series of Jpegz with the blueprints of an experimental Hypersonic Cruise missile developed in Argonne Labs, corrupted by "noise" which is in fact the encryption of the blueprints of a Nuke warhead.
The dudes won't see the pics of the nuke warhead... so they let me go ... Lulllzzzz...
Why would anyone have a bunch of files containing random data on their drives? Seems like it would be a bit suspicious.
Well, they could be maybe a .bin and .cue being stored, or maybe I lost the .cue. Maybe they're just random seeds. I know there's a site called hotbits where you can download random data taken from nuclear decay ... it has applications in encryption and stuff. I could always say it is corrupt data, and I'm trying to recover it.
I know there's a site called hotbits where you can download random data taken from nuclear decay
random.org is another one; they use atmospheric noise (although one could argue that this isn't adequately "random", but I'm not gonna start up another determinism debate here...I'm done with that $#!t for now ).
Why would anyone have a bunch of files containing random data on their drives? Seems like it would be a bit suspicious.
This reminds me of the argument a fascist co-worker gave me once. He said he didn't believe police should be required to have warrants to enter your home. His theory was if you're not doing anything illegal you have no reason to prevent them walking in any time they want. I pointed out that taking a dump isn't illegal but I don't want anyone walking in on me while I do it.
This reminds me of the argument a fascist co-worker gave me once. He said he didn't believe police should be required to have warrants to enter your home. His theory was if you're not doing anything illegal you have no reason to prevent them walking in any time they want. I pointed out that taking a dump isn't illegal but I don't want anyone walking in on me while I do it.
If this is so, then I should have the right to walk in on the cop any time I want, just to make sure he isn't doing anything illegal either. Some goes for bankers and politicians ... I can come by anytime and make sure they aren't embezzling.
Boot from live system and do not attempt to mount / access the drive. This way you wont have any of its contents in RAM (and in /dev/urandom as result) so that data cannot be written back to it while overwriting with random data
shred /dev/hda
badblocks -wvvf /dev/hda
overwrites 3 times with random data, tests for bad blocks and gives you a report on the drive's condition (overwriting it some more), and leaves it full of zeroes perfect for further use
randomly in my new job this has been one of the first tasks I've been doing.
So far I've dug out 24x250gb sata drives which need formatting >_< Got 2x usb caddys going with shred, plus I built another system and got shred running on another 4 within that booting off a ubuntu usb key.
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Lulllzzzz...
).
