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Comment by aborsy | Hacker News Reader

Hence the importance of the full disk encryption!

Came here to say I hope it was encrypted. Being a laptop I hope the IT person saw it fit to have it encrypted just because it is more easily prone to theft.

I mean, why are we paying the NSA, if Congress has unencrypted laptops. Literally their role to recommend security methods for encryption of companies and US interests. That is what I wonder every time I’m required to throw away my bottle of water and remove clothes to board a plane.

Fooled me. I thought their role was to spy on American citizens and create vulnerabilities by strong arming backdoors into everything.

I believe this activity now falls under the purview of CISA.

I read yesterday that all computers issued for Congressional staffers after 2017 have full disk encryption enabled by default.

So all laptops they were issued before 2017 didn't have full disk encryption.

Do you hear that? That's the sound of me face-palming.

> So all laptops they were issued before 2017 didn't have full disk encryption.

That's an illogical assumption to make. Not encrypted at time of issue != not encrypted ever. Who says all previously-issued laptops weren't encrypted at a later time?

No, it doesn't mean that. It's a possibility, but it's not what the comment above says. From this date X is enforced doesn't mean that X didn't happen before.

It could also mean a change in policy which makes official what was already happening.

For staffers, sure. But it's a better-than-even-odds bet that if senators and representatives raise a stink about how secure laptops are hard to use, they get special treatment.

Did you see the picture of Pelosi's desktop monitor? Pelosi was on the House floor at the time, wasn't she? Why wasn't there even a screen lock?

Recommend doesn't mean enforce.

I don't understand why Windows 10 doesn't take an encryption first approach. When you install Windows 10, it should default to having disk encryption checked.

Not certain this is the reason why, but there is a real perf hit for full disk encryption which not everyone needs to take, especially for devices without hardware accelerated crypto. Lower end devices can slow to a crawl.

Can you specify what are those devices which do not have hardware encryption support? Processors have had hardware support for ages. On the Intel side, at least from 2006, with the Core2Duo.

Any modern system(even on the low end) that you could conceivably want to trust important data to can handle encryption requirements with ease.

One problem if we are talking about Bitlocker specifically is that if the drive reports that it supports encryption, then Bitlocker offloads the responsibility to the drive. And the drive encryption might be badly implemented.

And multi-factor authentication!

And remote self-destruct!

Better than that might be an internet-free LoJack. Finding a laptop thief might be at least as valuable as retaining the encrypted information that's on disk.

Edit: Also, stealing a laptop that belongs to the office of the US Speaker of the House will essentially never end well. There are endless examples to suggest that yesterday's fracas wasn't thought-through by the participants. This is one of them.

There's also plenty of evidence that it was planned, like people openly planning doing exactly this on forums. They had merch printed up. It was Trump who either wasn't in on the planning or got cold feet when the time for the actual coup came.

And my axe!

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