Re: The hammer is best

[email protected] (Kenny McCormack) writes:
> Carlos E.R. <[email protected]> wrote:
> ...
>>>   are hidden buffers plus the wear-leveling scheme
>>>   gets in the way. You wipe 'em the Hillary Clinton
>>>   way - HAMMER :-)
>>
>> Instead, use encryption, on the device or the partitions.
>
> Hammer is better, because encryption can be worked around by holding a
> gun to the head of the person who knows the encryption key.

My backup drives are encrypted. In principle they could be stolen from
here, from an offsite location or in transit and if that happens I won’t
have the opportunity to destroy it.

The chances that someone would threaten my life or liberty over it are
negligible, but if they did, they wouldn’t need to wait for a device to
be disposed of, they’d just turn up at my door with a weapon, RIPA
notice or other leverage.

Physical destruction is not really relevant for most of the lifetime of
confidential data, and encryption does actually achieve something useful
in realistic use cases.

High value data is protected by keys that no human knows.

-- 
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/