Wouldn't it be easier to just wipe the drive before TSA?
Telling the hands of the government that they don't have the authority seems like a very fast ticket to a very inconvenient travel delay. There's almost certainly some rule or administrative thing where they Can Get Away With pretty much what they say you can, and then you're stuck finding a lawyer.
If your expected adversary is a nation-state intelligence agency, what do you expect to do? Take your laptop with you everywhere you go, all the time? Leave in your apartment for a theoretical attacker to execute an evil maid attack on it?
FDE is highly useful against ordinary adversaries. People with the financial/staffing/training resources to run surveillance on you 24x7 and access your equipment while it's unattended, that's an entirely other ball game.
Take for example China. There are plenty of rumours about business executives taking throw-away electronics while crossing the border or how China installs some random software on people's devices when crossing a border neighbouring a certain province[1]
FDE can also lead to increased suspicion when crossing a border and refusal to unlock the system can pretty much lead to a denial of entry or, worse, detention. FDE also doesn't help in cases when a random border crossing can require installing a malicious boot-loader or a persistent malware somewhere in the system.
In the China story, they might not be installing a persistent bootloader but there's nothing really stopping them from doing that.
Honestly, in certain cases (and I'd rather say, a lot of cases) it's just easier to have no device than deal with what they did to your device after the fact or just sell the device after entering if you are suspicious of it.
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne94dg/jingwang-a...
For instance a TSA screener is not going to have access to the latest and greatest because information about it gets leaked people will take counter measures.
With a small laptop, this is a very small problem.
>Leave in your apartment for a theoretical attacker to execute an evil maid attack on it?
Security cameras?
With very basic training anyone can maintain good physical opsec, the much harder part is keeping your software secure.
TPM + FDE?
Now, if all your files live in the cloud, and you have your setup automated completely, why not?
While we’re here, let me just add another little form of “geographic advantage” (?) to the mix: you all know cmd-‘ pages through windows of the same application. On a US layout ‘ is right up next to tab, which makes it extremely convenient to remember the mnemonics of cmd-‘ and cmd-tab. In US intl ‘ is shoved down next to lshift, and the premium key top of tab is the useless §.
Why? Apple, why?!