In may require a warrant, but following severe breakdown of civil administration caused by either unrest or natural disaster, the rules may not be followed to the letter.

I think it's desirable - across the spectrum of proposals for user-controlled network devices generally, not just Debian Freedomboxen - to store as much state as possible on very small removable media - i.e. micro-SD cards or similar - so that in the event of a raid by people likely to wish to silence your node, all that has to be concealed is a 15mm x 11mm card, which could be swallowed or easily concealed in any number of places. After the event the card could be inserted into another suitable device and the node would be back up and running with the same state it had previously.

I agree that having tiny portable storage devices would be very useful for concealment and smuggling. But... There are severe technical problems to be solved to make flash-based devices such as SD or microSD cards usable for information that you want to keep private from "the authorities". Due to flash's inability to overwrite data in place, flash-based memories make multiple copies of your data, don't keep track of the extra copies, and don't rapidly or securely erase them. Many provide no interface that merely asks the entire device to erase itself into a clean, secure state. Once you've written an incriminating file, or a crypto key, onto a flash-based device, you can never be sure whether physically seizing the device, ripping it open and probing the flash chips will produce a copy of that file or key -- or not. The only ways to be sure are to (1) rip it apart yourself and look -- oops, the drive is now dead; or (2) physically grind it into sand. See: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/m3wei/ http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/Fast2011SecErase.pdf Rotating magnetic disk drives have SOLVED this problem; they provide Secure Erase commands that erase the drive such that not even experts can extract the former contents (hdparm --security-erase-extended). They are also quite good at securely erasing single files without destroying the rest of the data and without physically destroying the drive (GNU Shred). Until the Flash hardware community provides similar facilities, I recommend that the Freedom Box project fully support magnetic disk drives for those who choose them. Activists' lives depend on getting this right. John _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE