SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
bag while I was repacking the week before to make room for X-1, and I was snoring in
seconds.
-..-
When I woke up the sky was dark and my tea was cold. I finally had that shower, staying
under the hot water until it ran ice cold, scrubbing the dust out of my pores. Then I went into
my room and started piling up laundry and separating out gear that needed to be hosed
down outside in the driveway or wiped down on my workbench. Finally, I unpacked my
utility belt and found myself holding on to a dusty USB stick.
Normally I'm pretty careful with my data. That means that I don't leave anything important
on a USB stick. People lose those things all the time. The first thing to do with something
important is to stick it in a computer -- my latest frankenbook, a hand-built laptop called
Lurching Abomination that was the distant descendant of Salmagundi, the first laptop I ever
built for myself. Lurching Abomination had a whopper of a hard drive, two terabytes, and I
used TrueCrypt to give myself a “plausible deniability” partition, so that if you just turned it
on and entered a crypto key, you'd get what looked like a normal ParanoidLinux installation
with a browser and an email client that was hooked up to my public email addresses and
Xnet accounts, where I got all the spam and friend requests from strangers and bots and
stuff.
But if you -- or if I -- entered another password when starting up the machine, there was
another ParanoidLinux instance hiding on that monster disk, and this one was only hooked
up to my private accounts, my private bookmarks, my private calendars, my private social
nets, and so on. With a little bit of monkeying, I could boot into the secure, secret version
of my computer, fire up a virtual computer in a window, and put the plausible deniability
version in that.
Next to Lurching Abomination was a standalone hard drive, and Lurch was smart enough
to check every few minutes and see if the disk was connected, and if it was, to back itself
up. That disk was also encrypted (duh -- what would the point of doing all the crazy stuff
with Lurch's disk be if I was going to make an unscrambled copy of all the data and leave
it on my desk?). The disk's enclosure had enough smarts to try to periodically hook up to
one of the big servers at Noisebridge and try to make a copy of itself there.
This all more or less worked, most of the time, and it meant that within a few minutes of
copying any files onto my laptop, they would be encrypted, copied to my desktop drive, and
copied again to Noisebridge's array. That server was synched up with a massive storage
farm run by and for hackspaces, located in an old nuclear fallout shelter somewhere in
England (seriously!). So yeah, do your worst, steal my laptop, burn down my house, nuke
San Francisco, and I'll still have a backup. Mwa-ha-ha. Yeah, it's crazy-paranoid, but: a)
I'd been through some paranoid stuff, and b) it wasn't much harder than just using a commercial
backup program, only my solution was safer and more robust and cheaper.
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