Encrypted filesystems

[Kent Borg]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 11:09:34AM -0400, Kevin D. Clark wrote:
> 
> Kent Borg writes:
> 
> > And what happens the day you are pulled aside at customs or airport
> > security and are ordered to type in your passphrase?  What do you do?
> > Do you care if they see your data?  (How much do you care?)
> 
> Is there any legal reason (in the US) why you'd ever have to do this?

There is the question of rights, and there is the practical
circumstance.  What *do* you do when they guy who can make you miss
you plane at minimum (and far worse with a little effort) orders you
to type in the passphrase?  A lot of Bill of Rights niceties I used to
take as mine have been rather abridged of late.

As for when crossing the border, you have *very* few rights compared
with once you are in the USA.

> If so, what if you responded "I forgot my passphrase."?

It might work if the prompt is obscure (the result of typing "mount -o
encryption=aes-256 file /mnt/loop/") but might not if it is in their
faces ("Welcome to Linux, please type passphrase for encrypted
partition:").  Having the above mount command in your history file
would be someplace between the too...


-kb