Encrypting Your Laptop Like You Mean It
Micah Lee
Time and again, people are told there is one obvious way to mitigate
privacy threats of all sorts, from mass government surveillance to
pervasive online tracking to cybercriminals: Encryption. As President
Obama put it
earlier this year, speaking in between his administration’s attacks on
encryption, “There’s no scenario in which we don’t want really strong
encryption.” Even after helping expose all the ways the government can
get its hands on your data, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden still
maintained, “Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto
systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.”
But how can ordinary people get started using encryption? Encryption
comes in many forms and is used at many different stages in the handling
of digital information (you’re using it right now, perhaps without even
realizing it, because your connection to this website is encrypted).
When you’re trying to protect your privacy, it’s totally unclear how,
exactly, to start using encryption. One obvious place to start, where
the privacy benefits are high and the technical learning curve is low,
is something called full disk encryption. Full disk encryption not only
provides the type of strong encryption Snowden and Obama reference, but
it’s built-in to all major operating systems, it’s the only way to
protect your data in case your laptop gets lost or stolen, and it takes
minimal effort to get started and use.
If you want to encrypt your hard disk and have it truly help protect
your data, you shouldn’t just flip it on; you should know the basics of
what disk encryption protects, what it doesn’t protect, and how to avoid
common mistakes that could let an attacker easily bypass your
encryption.
If you’re in a hurry, go ahead and skip to the bottom, where I explain, step-by-step, how to encrypt your disk for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Then, when you have time, come back and read the important caveats preceding those instructions.
