[mirimir]

The worst thing to do, when facing rubber hoses, or legalistic equivalents thereof, is to lie. Especially if you're not a well-trained lier. And especially if there may be independent evidence that would trip you up. The best option is having nothing to hide. When crossing hazardous borders, sensitive stuff should be securely in the cloud. And when coercion is likely, a third party should control access to it.

[Cthulhu_]

> securely in the cloud

isn't this a contradiction? Given how the NSA and co have backdoors in the cloud and such, and can order the operators of said cloud service to release information from their users.

If you have sensitive stuff, best not to cross any borders I'd say. Stay away from the US.

[mirimir]

Here's a simple hack. Anonymously lease N inexpensive VPS. Archive your stuff (perhaps a VM) with tar, encrypt with gpg, and use split to get N pieces. Use bbcp to put distinct subsets of pieces on each VPS, such that any M of the N VPS will give your stuff back.

[nine_k]

Consider SpiderOak or similar things that encrypt data on the client side and never upload the key.

[StavrosK]

Borg is the best backup software I've found, for what it's worth.

[sspiff]

Except that travellers may be (and sometimes are being) asked for login credentials to online accounts.

[loup-vaillant]

I'm sure we can think of a "double lock" feature, where you allow a friend to lock you out of your account.

There's even an easy local solution: encrypt your data with a friend's public key (sealed box in libsodium parlance). It may be seized and intercepted, but you can't possibly decrypt it.

That's probably the kind of scheme Snowden used when he arranged his inability to decrypt his NSA data even if captured and tortured by some foreign country.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

The really bad people, are probably at that point going torture you just to make an example of you to discourage others from doing the same.

[mirimir]

Yeah, that's the downside of carrying stuff that you can't decrypt. They won't believe you, and won't stop until you decrypt it. Better is not to have anything sensitive with you.

[pessimizer]

Encrypted volumes look random. There's no way of proving whether or not you have something you can't decrypt. Hence the need to have some innocent volume to decrypt as a tool in the argument to convince an interrogator that you have nothing left to hide.

[loup-vaillant]

Better yet, fill every hard drive with random junk before formatting and selling them. If everyone has random data in their free space, it won't even look suspicious.

[mirimir]

I don't mean normal online accounts. I mean something like the WikiLeaks upload site.[0] Once stuff is uploaded, you don't have control, or even access.

0) http://wlupld3ptjvsgwqw.onion