‘If you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data’
August 14th, 2012Keep in mind, we don’t know what happens when a drive is sent to NSA, as when laptops are stolen from people by the U.S. Government at airports. We only hear about encryption frustrating criminal investigations. I don’t know of a single case involving national security and full disk encryption. If you do, let me know.
With regard to the alleged privacy one supposedly enjoys with the iPhone: What privacy exists if the device is constantly phoning home to the carrier and Apple and both of them can be subpoenaed? Hmm.
All of that said, I think full disk encryption is a good thing. I use it, and I’d recommend that you use it too.
Via: MIT Technology Review:
“I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you’re done,” Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab at the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Department of Justice, said during his keynote address at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C., last Monday. “When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data.”
I removed an encrypted USB key once without properly removing it and that corrupted the data on it.
The correct way to remove a USB key/drive is to unmount it in Truecrypt *AND* eject the drive in Windows. If you do *both* of these everytime before unplugging a USB key your data will be safe.