[expat1000]

The biggest practical problem here would be keeping the harmless “decoy” up to date. You would have to web surf entertainment sites, play games, etc. and that eats up time, and has to be done all the time. Now if the computer could be made to show operating systems running in both the decoy and the hidden volume simultaneously, keeping the decoy up to date would be easier, but that probably creates other problems

I can't say I understand the second part, but I agree with the first, or I suppose leave it blank and you could say you set it up but never got around to using it.

My bigger concern would be that the inner volume would only show as empty to a very cursory examination. Even if it couldn't be decrypted, that would be trouble.

[Little Pig]

An encrypted volume looks “full” whether there’s something in there or not.

[HiTech RedNeck]

The idea seems to be that the inner volume would appear to be a free space area filled with garbage that is as equally random to statistical inspection as free space on the outer volume is. It’s not like there is a bunch of nulls on the drive then all of a sudden this big balloon of “garbage.”

[Alas Babylon!]

I use virtual machines. I can delete and overwrite them fairly easily.

You do all your web browsing from the VM, and all the port 80 calls go directly thru the hosts virtual switch, which doesn’t log the ip addresses used (it may log the MAC addresses, but that’s not really helpful to know where you went outside the local network). Of course, you can encrypt your virtual machines .vhd and .vmdk files but it puts a load on your performance.

You’d have to turn off some of your logging and other data on the VM host software, but it could be done. Yup, I like using vm’s to do stuff that is no one else’s business.

Someone tell these judges that if a woman’s right to privacy lets her kill her unborn baby, then I have an equal right to privacy from the prying eyes of government! What a country!!!