[bb88]

> if sufficiently motivated, there's no reason that an authoritarian state wouldn't just keep torturing you anyway.

Sure, but it helps to make it look like you're someone not worth torturing in the first place. The same look would happen when you decrypt your TrueCrypt partition.

Large unused sections on the laptop with random data is a bad look for someone trying to say they're not a spy.

If it were me, I would do something more like bring a laptop with a bunch of biblical research and ask everyone in the checkpoint, if they've taken Jesus Christ into their heart.

This of course assumes that in this instance the authoritarian regime just finds these sorts of religious people annoying and not dangerous. I wouldn't do this coming into Iran, say.