[ghaff]

>A self-destruct button really doesn't make sense

Bryan--you mean Star Trek didn't get it right? Well, at least they didn't allow shell scripts.

It's an interesting philosophical question though. At what point do you decide that the user truly really can't want to do this even though they've said that they do?

[bhaak]

rm -rf is not self-destruct button. It's just a "take everything out of the closets, rip of the labels, and throw it on a heap".

A real self-destruct button would ensure you couldn't recover the data anymore.

So at least try "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda" or more elegant when available, throw away the decryption key.