If you'd rather keep your data private, take heart: disk encryption is a lot harder to break than techno-thriller movies and TV shows make it out to be, to the chagrin of some branches of law enforcement.

MrSeb writes with word of a paper titled "The growing impact of full disk encryption on digital forensics" [abstract here to paywalled article] that illustrates just how diligent it is. as it should be to the paper, co-authored by a member of US-CERT, "here are three main problems with full disk encryption (FDE): First, evidence-gathering goons can turn off the brain* (for transportation) without credit it's encrypted, and thus can't get back at the data (unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do); second, if the dissection team doesn't know that the disk is encrypted, it can waste hours trying to read existent that's finally unreadable; and finally, in the case of hardware-level disk encryption, tampering with the device can trigger self-destruction of the data. The paper does go on to suggest some ways to ameliorate these issues, but finally the researchers aren't hopeful: 'Research is needed to develop new techniques and statistical mechanics for burglary or bypassing full disk encryption.'"

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