TSA Searching Your Laptop
In the tenth anniversary edition of his Cryptogram (congrats by the way, Bruce), Bruce Schneier references an article that originally appeared in The Guardian talking about how the Transport Safety Administration (TSA) is now searching laptops in some cases when departing the country. This means that when traveling, your data is not safe. Moreover, they have the right to confiscate your hardware. How can you ensure that your data is safe? Schneier naturally recommends the use of encryption. While there’s many ways to do this, what I personally have been doing lately is using TrueCrypt to create and encrypted file that I store on an external USB drive. This way, not only is your data encrypted, but it’s not even physically on the laptop. The nice thing about TrueCrypt is that it’s free (open source) and it’s cross platform. So if you need access this data from various platforms, you have the ability to do so. Go download this and start using it if you’ll be traveling out of the country any time soon.
Technorati Tags: TrueCrypt, TSA
