[leobelle]

Does Truecrypt have the capability to provide a password that ruins the secret? You could give your tormentors a password that once used deletes or makes the protected content permanently inaccessible and yeah they'll still beat you to death, but now they can never have what they wanted from you.

[tripa]

If it had, the tormentors would just back up the drive before attempting to access the data.

[leobelle]

Good point, that would totally circumvent this, and a read-only system would too.

[misnome]

No, only if they then put a load of files into the opened partition. Which would be stupid.

You can't have this sort of thing because it is easily circumvented by opening the encrypted volume on a read-only disk.

[im3w1l]

While such a scheme would be possible using quantum cryptography, it is not possible with truecrypt, no.

[kordless]

Or alternately, unencrypts only portions of the drive leaving the rest hidden.

[leobelle]

I don't think that's possible.

[kordless]

Contrary to the downvote and claim of implausibility, steganography does exactly that. A partition could easily contain extraneous data which could be used to hide and encrypt a message.