Any terrorist could manufacture all he wants with a flat mill bastard file and a little work. Axle grease can be used as a binder.

A quick Scroogle search (try it, you’ll like it, especially if you don’t want to be logged by Google as searching for instructions on how to manufacture thermite) gave Wikipedia as an excellent source for information. The Screen Savers TV show actually did melt a hard drive–good video.

Thermite-like materials are used for welding in construction and are easily available.

The most difficult part would be reliable ignition when required. And that is not difficult with a switch, lithium battery and light bulb filament (with the glass removed). Can you imagine Homeland Security trying to ban those three items?

However I will say that I find the removing of the link; disturbing.

i suppose its a game of cover your ass, but seriously, it was posted on a site in complete public view and was broadcast on a cable television show, there was no reason to censor it.

Thanks for this article. It comes at a good time as I want to be more security conscious. I can hear my Dad now, “If you have nothing to hide then why do this?” Habit, just habit, until I need it. I cannot see how the government can bitch about a man having naked pictures of his wife and having with sex with her on his computer, home movies or Polaroids. How low can someone or government go to portray sex between a man and his wife as porn just because they record it is beyond me. I could be guilty of the same offense. Just put me on that jury–a good case for jury nullification. If jury nullification is good enough for black murderers of white women then I can do it as well.

I BELIEVE THE WORD porn IS MISUSED by the government for their pwned purposes (misspelling intended). The use of that word in conjunction with a person’s name hangs the label of SHAME on that person and prejudices the audience against that person. It is a cheap trick.

I just installed SuSE Linux as dual boot (XP) on my notebook with an encrypted partition. The instructions also said to add an encrypted file to the encrypted partition. A little more work but it makes sense as root has access to the encrypted partition.

My passwords are difficult for even me to remember. I don’t use the same password twice for important stuff. I use mnemonics to assist me. My passwords are quite complex and would take a lot of work to guess with government computers.

Phil Zimmerman has stated repeatedly that PGP does not have backdoors and so far I have not heard of any compromises. Linux I trust but not Microsoft, Compaq, and others of that ilk.

Again, thank you for an awareness of this issue and I look forward to further information.

Regards, forstand (savvy in Swedish)

Currently there is not Full Disk Encryption for MacOS X.
PGPDisk will allow you to setup encrypted physical and logical volumes, but it won’t work on the entire boot volume.

Also, FileVault works on 10.3 and 10.4 and while it can’t be used to secure the entire boot volume, you do not need to have your entire Home directory encrypted either. You can use Disk Utility to create an encrypted image of any size which you can use to store only the files you want.

As for the security of FileVault, there is only one publicly known analysis.

BTW, there is no point in trying to use any sort of encryption to hide anything from the US govn’t. They will break through it, even if they don’t publicly acknowledge that they can…