/fucko/ FBI edition

Just get on the highway and play the fucking license plate game. Pick random cars, write em down, and then convert to '\xXX\xXX' string that you can pass to openssl.

Try stealing that data from me. I dare you.

LUKS + microwave = unrecoverable shit

A big black guy raped him and it's the time when he lost his virginity!

I actually lost my virginity that way.

Not the user you were replying by the way.

Was it as bad as people make it out to be?

As with everything, depends on your threat model.

Full Disk Encryption grants some basic levels of comfort. Someone steals your machine, luks will keep your data safe from the lowlife thief, and the person he shills it to. Drive in an array fails, luks will let you bin it or send it in for warranty repairs/replacement without needing to worry about leaking the partial data on it. Re-purposing the drive? `cryptsetup luksErase ` will return it to near-enough random noise in two seconds by destroying the headers (there are backup sectors, `dd`'ing the first few MB is not enough).

Nation state threats, harder to solve. Digital then physical destruction is best - modern disk controllers do all sorts of clever things that make it harder to digitally erase (another bonus point for FDE - you've never written a plaintext block of data) so total physical destruction is next to ensure coverage. Shoot it, hit it with hammers, shatter the platters, drill through the flash chips, set it on fire, toss it in an engine shredder.

Worried the FBI is coming down the hallway and about to kick in your door? Probably too late by now, they've got enough shit on you to kick in your door but luksErase that shit and hurl the drive out the nearest window as fast as you can. But again, if they're who you are worried about, you'll probably do things differently.

But what is more likely? Your drive fails or is stolen, or the NSA want to get all up in your shit?

I have at least one of these in every computer: onerng.info/onerng/

I put a USB hub inside my X200 too, and embedded one inside that - keeps my USB ports free of kinda obnoxiously sized/shaped dongles, and always travels with me.

What's the best OS for securing yourself against the US government and corporate dataminers?

Yes. I still didn't recover from it.