how to hide sensitive documents?

Thanks for your help ! I don't have much people around me and use windows so I'll try to get some infos about how they spy on users. Do you know if apple products are more respectful towards their users privacy ?

Normally no one would check whats in my computer but with tor installed... Someone could get suspicious, I don't know if computer techniciens like or have time to check whats in the computer but that could be a problem.

I will check Veracrypt but I think that the best solution for me is to make it look like story, censor some words and store it in one or two USB keys with plenty of non related documents inside.
 
Sirius said:
Thanks for your help ! I don't have much people around me and use windows so I'll try to get some infos about how they spy on users. Do you know if apple products are more respectful towards their users privacy ?

Normally no one would check whats in my computer but with tor installed... Someone could get suspicious, I don't know if computer techniciens like or have time to check whats in the computer but that could be a problem.

I will check Veracrypt but I think that the best solution for me is to make it look like story, censor some words and store it in one or two USB keys with plenty of non related documents inside.
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If a computer repair technician has the slightest feeling that you have ANYTHING juicy on your computer, whether it's legal material or not, trust me, he's going for it.
 
pes said:
I know. I have done it too. :D And discovered weird fetishes of other people.
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And please know, I wasn't trying to disparage comp techs. I'm the same...my curiosity would get the better of me, but I would keep it to myself as you likely did.
 
Depending on how in depth you want to go, you could use steganography software to hide the text behind an image. I use S-tools for this because it is a simple drag and drop. I also highly recommend some sort of encryption software.
 
Kristy said:
And please know, I wasn't trying to disparage comp techs. I'm the same...my curiosity would get the better of me, but I would keep it to myself as you likely did.
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I was like this, my principle was if you leave me alone with your computer, I'm going to look at your shit. There was some pretty weird search history from the types of people you wouldn't suspect, but never any beast/zoo.
 
I once bought a Sandisk USB that came with a locker you could install on your pc and password-protect files you put in it. I messed around with it a bit and it seemed to work for that purpose, but I really didn't put it to use. There may have been a function for saving simultaneously to the locker and USB. Only if it had that function, and only if the USB version of your files was also password-protected, would it really be what is needed.
 
I believe windows has a default encryption software called BitLocker or BitLocker to go which can encrypt a drive or usb
 
pes said:
Or you can just use VeraCrypt container set to use a hidden volume and store it there. :D
VeraCrypt is a opensource encryption software capable of creating special hidden volumes with strong 3 times encryption.
It works like this. The volume has two parts a "public" part that you fill up with sensitive looking data but it is fake, it is something you intend to disclose and what looks like something worth hiding. Like your collection of weird but legal hardcore bdsm piss gay porn. :D

Than it has a hidden part with a separate password that actually contains the protected data. Provided you use it correctly, the hidden part should not be detectable. Veracrypt has a nice tutorial on creating the volumes so do not be afraid to use it.
Use strong, long, complicated passwords and do not use Windows :D As that system has spying built into it and is proud of it. If you forget your password do not worry about it, NSA will send it to you the next day. :D
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How long did you wait for this question you were very happy lol
 
Some good advice already.

First, what you have written will hardly put you in jail. Even if you included dates, places and real names, which you shouldn't. It can all be discarded as fantasy, material for a novel, etc in court.

If you still want to hook into real individual, places and dates, you could code them in different ways. For instance, if your person in the text is one Jane Doe in Miami and the date is november 10 2020, you could deduct one letter and one number from the initial of the name, place and date. Then you'd have Inez Cruz in Lansing and the date becomes october 10 2019. Alphabetically J-1=I, D-1=C, M-1=L. November - 1 = October. And so on.

You could also add a letter or you could deduce two letters.

Further, for normal needs, you don't need more encryption than what 7z or a similar packing program offers. A good password is considered one that consists of both big and small letters, numbers and special characters, like !"#$%&/()=?`. Take for instance the word rubadub, which you could write as Rü6Adu6.

Using TOR is not a good idea. In fact, it's a very bad idea.

If you were some law enforcement agency, or some national security agency, where would you look for troublesome people? Not at some porn site, not on a site discussing cars, not on a traveling forum. You would fish where the fish are. People using TOR.

And lastly, your average computer technician may be able to crack some easier passwords, so keep to the above standard. However, all those government letter agencies have access to some formidable computing power, they can truly crack any whatsoever password. What would take 50 million years for an ordinary PC is cracked in minutes by a quantum computer.

Don't do illegal stuff, and even more important, don't do illegal stuff that particularly matters to the powers that be. They pretty much only care about themselves, so you fucking your dog doesn't much interest them.
 
Rapscallion One said:
Don't do illegal stuff, and even more important, don't do illegal stuff that particularly matters to the powers that be. They pretty much only care about themselves, so you fucking your dog doesn't much interest them.
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Quite Ironic, when being here might be illegal if writing bestiality stories is illegal for OP
 
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Sirius said:
Thanks for your help ! I don't have much people around me and use windows so I'll try to get some infos about how they spy on users. Do you know if apple products are more respectful towards their users privacy ?

Normally no one would check whats in my computer but with tor installed... Someone could get suspicious, I don't know if computer techniciens like or have time to check whats in the computer but that could be a problem.

I will check Veracrypt but I think that the best solution for me is to make it look like story, censor some words and store it in one or two USB keys with plenty of non related documents inside.
Click to expand...
There's a software I know law enforcement uses that will check your hard drive and everything that's on the computer. Even if deleted. But for SSD. Not sure.
You can most likely use Veracrypt, you can make a hidden partition where you have the normal stuff on a normal side with a password, and the hidden side with the other stuff with a password. Or have it encrypt an entire hard drive. (I recommend an external.)
If it's just a text file though. I wouldn't worry too much. If you don't have something that goes along with it like content that matches up to the story. It leaves people guessing.

Majority of people I'm sure use Tor. Plus if someone asked you can just say you wanted to see what it was. Obviously if you're not on the hunt for illegal content on there. You're good.
 
dogluver101 said:
There's a software I know law enforcement uses that will check your hard drive and everything that's on the computer. Even if deleted. But for SSD. Not sure.
You can most likely use Veracrypt, you can make a hidden partition where you have the normal stuff on a normal side with a password, and the hidden side with the other stuff with a password. Or have it encrypt an entire hard drive. (I recommend an external.)
If it's just a text file though. I wouldn't worry too much. If you don't have something that goes along with it like content that matches up to the story. It leaves people guessing.

Majority of people I'm sure use Tor. Plus if someone asked you can just say you wanted to see what it was. Obviously if you're not on the hunt for illegal content on there. You're good.
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Depending on the police funding will let you know of various programs. Most will have a Cellibrite UFED which is used for cellphones. It supposedly works for the top 10,000 most popular phones. Pc forensics is an open ball game though. Some places use EnCase, others use Autopsy. Autopsy and FTK Imager can both read deleted files. Hidden Partitions are a territory I do not know much about because I haven't dealt with them. Hope this info helps.
 
pes said:
If you forget your password do not worry about it, NSA will send it to you the next day. :D
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As someone who has worked under the authority of the NSA, it's not them that would have access to your info. I would trust them over the FBI, DHS, and CIA for US citizen data. If you want to subjugate yourself to VERY dry legal speak with a lot of jargon that explains why, look up the declassified SP0018 document that all NSA members must abide by.

I know you were just joking, but I make a point of it whenever I see that joke.
 
dogluver101 said:
There's a software I know law enforcement uses that will check your hard drive and everything that's on the computer. Even if deleted.
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The reason why it can be found even if deleted is because "deleted" files are not erased on the hard drive, the only thing that changed is the information that says where a file is located is erased. If there's no indication a file exists, the system acts like it's not there. This is true regardless of the medium of storage. It's beneficial because all drives are only good for so many writes, so not erasing data makes a drive last longer.

Now, if you want to get around that, you can run a script that forcibly writes zeroes across any "empty" space in the hard drive. That will permanently erase the data. There are plenty of Google articles that cover several ways of doing the same task.

Edit: to those that may be curious about how I know this, it is unrelated to my previous employment in the above comment of mine. I originally went to college for IT with an emphasis on network security. I took a class that covered exactly this information.
 
Rapscallion One said:
Using TOR is not a good idea. In fact, it's a very bad idea.

If you were some law enforcement agency, or some national security agency, where would you look for troublesome people? Not at some porn site, not on a site discussing cars, not on a traveling forum. You would fish where the fish are. People using TOR.
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I disagree. If you use TOR and a logless VPN, you are almost entirely secure. Reason is that they would have to associate you with the illicit browsing to really do anything. They can't track the content easily because the TOR relay system and encryption, so the point from server to VPN is pretty secure. Then the information is encrypted and sent to you through the VPN.

Using a VPN is becoming fairly common, so an ISP has no reasonable suspicion or indication that you are even using TOR to justify trying to crack that encryption to see what you are doing.

TL;DR use a good VPN, TOR, and do everything in your power to avoid privacy snooping, and you are basically good.
 
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Voyguy5533 said:
They can't track the content easily because the TOR relay system and encryption, so the point from server to VPN is pretty secure.
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Didn't they use TOR as a big trap to catch a lot of people with ill intent a year ago or so? Also, in Belgium, there was a similar system for cell phones, it encrypted everything, and it was used by, among others, drug dealers, it turned out the cops had a backdoor to it.

I agree on using a VPN, which will keep you fairly protected, but not if you do really serious stuff, like selling drugs or engage in terrorism, which you of course never should do.
 
Rapscallion One said:
Didn't they use TOR as a big trap to catch a lot of people with ill intent a year ago or so?
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More often than not, the people governments are trying to track are the suppliers, not the consumers. this is true for any illicit content. drugs, illegal porn, etc. This is why I deliberately chose to say "pretty secure" and "basically good", as there is no guarantee that you are safe when using the internet. It's always better to not do something illegal in terms of risk, but risk vs reward, that's for individuals to decide.
 
My advices on data secourity: If something is not encrypted, consider it busted in case of some serious search. Just "hiding" stuff is a decent protection against an average friend who would try to find something on your drive and that's it. Steganography may be somewhat more effective but if I found a program for that installed, then guess what, I would run a script to check for patterns in every single image you have and most likely find the data. Plus most image compressions will destroy it. If you are serious about it then do not store any sensitive information unencrypted on any memory storage other than RAM (a second without electricity is plenty to wipe it out completely). You can erase it in most cases but it requires an action you may forget to do. It's safer to make sure it never gets saved in the first place. Encrypt either the file, partition or the whole drive. As long as the key is not stored and the encryption method is good it should be safe. I should warn though that encrypting multiple different files with the same key may make you vulnerable to some attacks so keep things as one chunk of data or use different passwords for each file. Read a bit about the encryption algorithm you are about to use focusing on how long it takes to break and what can speed up the process. I will not recommend any particular encryption software because I use my own. Cryptopp library is good if you want to make some as well but for the love of god DO NOT INVENT YOUR OWN ENCRYPTION. The existing ones have had thousands of people trying to find vulnerabilities in them and that includes implementation. I speak from experience, you will fail to make a new, reliable one. Right now I use AES with 16B key in CFB mode. If you need to store an unencrypted file in the file system, you can mount a virtual partition in RAM. I do that a lot to play some .webm through TOR. Minimize your attack surface. In English: use as little and as trusted software as possible. Think what can have access to your sensitive data and what can you do to prevent that. Not having viruses counts so all the tips for not getting them also apply. Operating system is also a software.

So that would be all, as you can see I'm pretty paranoid about that. Security and convenience are usually the opposite so choose how much you want on your own.
 
Voyguy5533 said:
As someone who has worked under the authority of the NSA, it's not them that would have access to your info. I would trust them over the FBI, DHS, and CIA for US citizen data. If you want to subjugate yourself to VERY dry legal speak with a lot of jargon that explains why, look up the declassified SP0018 document that all NSA members must abide by.
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NSA wants us to trust NSA, I bet FBI wants us to trust them and not NSA.
Voyguy5533 said:
I disagree. If you use TOR and a logless VPN, you are almost entirely secure. Reason is that they would have to associate you with the illicit browsing to really do anything.
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Numerous claims and articles have been shown by tor users about these logless VPN logging and being part of the reason that lead to the arrest. If bestiality is illegal for OP then it is illicit browsing but FBI does this.
 
I'd still say veracrypt is the software to go to make encrypted containers to store your files. Also I have to add that nulling the free space on your hard drive will completely delete the traces that undelete tools would recover - so as a user of a unixoid operating system you can run the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=~/zero; rm~/zero" sometimes - though that might temporarily disturb programs that are writing to disk. Also the claim that (insert agency here) can break any password is false - governments don't have secret science, they just buy their stuff like anyone else, apart from some stuff they can tinker together. They might be able to brute-force passwords 3 characters longer than you, and that takes so much money to do that they will only do it for really spectacular cases. Also before someone comes with gutmann again: No, you don't have to overwrite the disc randomly, there was a method shown to recover data from a disk that was overwritten once - but a) that was in times when the data density was much lower than today, b) only demonstrated using laboratory equipment and only for about enough data to reconstruct a single character with drastically lowering probabilities the more you want and c) If it was possible data recovery specialists would sell that kind of service. I mean there is sometimes mission critical data that gets lost to companies or bitcoin wallets etc. so there is money to be made even if you have a million in costs.
 
hide things in plain sight. change words / names /places/dates on documents(stories) . use something like 'file shredder' to delete stuff when you want it properly gone, you could encrypt stuff into password protected .rar file but maybe title the file 'tax return' or 'bank details' or something that looks like you have a legitimate reason for encrypting it. never film stuff with a cell phone or store things on a cell phone. if you must film or photo things.. use a proper camera, and delete (shred) the SD card when transferred to pc.
 
This is just speculation but isn't it so that if your pictures and movies are scrambled, they can't, from a legal point of view, be considered bestiality pornography? It wouldn't even have to be some very advanced scrambling, just as long as it is unintelligible for the naked eye. Thoughts?
 
Rapscallion One said:
This is just speculation but isn't it so that if your pictures and movies are scrambled, they can't, from a legal point of view, be considered bestiality pornography? It wouldn't even have to be some very advanced scrambling, just as long as it is unintelligible for the naked eye. Thoughts?
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What is porn good for when you can not tell it is porn? :D Blurred images are hardly going to make anyone hard.
 
Rapscallion One said:
This is just speculation but isn't it so that if your pictures and movies are scrambled, they can't, from a legal point of view, be considered bestiality pornography? It wouldn't even have to be some very advanced scrambling, just as long as it is unintelligible for the naked eye. Thoughts?
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Encryption is basically scrambling just at the data level, making files or entire folders totally unreadable without a password or key. If you make an encrypted folder, they won't even see the contents without the password. Old encryption types have been cracked by law enforcement in the past, but the current ones like AES256 are way more secure and haven't been cracked so far. VeraCrypt is good program to set up an encrypted folder, just use a very strong password and memorise it. There is BitLocker to encrypt the entire hard drive (for Windows) but I've heard it's not reliable and has flaws.
 
The problem with encrypted data is that depending on your laws there might be circumstances where you must give up the password otherwise you will be punished. You basically either give them the password or go to jail. VeraCrypt and the previous TrueCrypt which VeraCrypt is based on supports hidden volumes for this purpose. One container has two passwords. One opens a decoy archive with sensitive looking data the other contains the actually hidden data.
Or do it like me and realize that porn is super easy to find online with tor and do not store porn at all. :D
 
Appreciate all the info! i have files I uploaded that's I have removed off here but still want to keep for memories. Usbs are always helpful
 
pes said:
The problem with encrypted data is that depending on your laws there might be circumstances where you must give up the password otherwise you will be punished. You basically either give them the password or go to jail. VeraCrypt and the previous TrueCrypt which VeraCrypt is based on supports hidden volumes for this purpose. One container has two passwords. One opens a decoy archive with sensitive looking data the other contains the actually hidden data.
Or do it like me and realize that porn is super easy to find online with tor and do not store porn at all. :D
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I thought about using this, but it's pretty obvious it's set up if the container size is say 50GB but once you open the decoy the mounted drive is only 5GB. I'd rather go to jail for not giving up the password to my secrets than for doggy porn. And they can't force you to provide a password you've forgotten, passwords in VeraCrypt are not recoverable unless you set up a recovery file.

Haha some porn is special and needs to be preserved forever in full resolution (not a rip of a rip). Maybe I'll make a time capsule and bury it somewhere for a future race to find :p
 
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