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Comment by brianjlogan | Hacker News Reader

In most instances I think torture would yield all of your knowledge including the secondary unlock.

Unless you're thinking your attacker would exclude you from torture for "yielding" the password.

I would think if they are capable of torturing you than they wouldn't stop at a polite confession.

Border agents inspect and copy many more digital devices than just those of people they actively suspect of something, or are willing to torture.

VeraCrypt hidden volumes are supposed to be a 100% deniable. There’s no way to prove they exist.

The idea is that they’ll stop torturing you because they don’t know of the existence of the hidden volume.

(In practice I suspect it leaves some subtle queues, but maybe perfect for a border crossing )

My understanding is that people who torture you don't know what you don't know; so they don't know when to stop. As such, they'll keep torturing you way past the point where you've admitted to everything you know. This is why information obtained under torture is considered unreliable: eventually you'll just say anything to stop the torture; further admissions will support the use of torture as an information extraction tactic, and then lead to more torture.

Yes but, under what pretext would you torture someone who has complied with all of your requests?

~"Do you have any encrypted data we can't see?"

"Yes. The entire drive is encrypted"

~"What is the key?"

"iloveapplesauce6969"

~"Well, that worked and I see your data here. What a lovely family.. is that Disney world?"

"Yes it was Timmy's 5th birthday"

~"I'm going to waterboard you"

Them: "You're still hiding something"

You: "This was everything!"

Them: "We don't believe you" -rubber hose-

You: "Stop it! I planned to blow up the world trade center!"

Them: "We knew you were a liar."

To themselves: "Wow, torture works."

Rinse, repeat.

In theory, you could just keep adding n+1 layers of fake passwords (maybe with realistic fake data), on the hope that after n attempts, they think they've broken you and hit the jackpot.

But as sibling commenters describe, if sufficiently motivated, there's no reason that an authoritarian state wouldn't just keep torturing you anyway. :(

> 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.

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