If you’re reading SurvivalBlog it’s a safe assumption you use a computer of some type, and you probably also use your computer for more than just surfing the Internet. One of the nice things about computers is that they make creating, editing, storing and moving large amounts of information a lot easier than trying to do everything with pen and paper, and a decent laptop with some solar panels for charging can operate for years even after the grid goes down. This allows you to easily create, edit and view things like inventories, maps of cache locations, communications SOPs, defense plans, codebooks, intelligence files, and lots of other useful but potentially sensitive information.
One of the big downsides of documenting any information is that once it exists, it can potentially be discovered and used by bad people, companies or government agencies that want what you have, want to know what you have or don’t want you to have it. This can include things like a burglar holding a gun to your head, a tech company collecting data on your activities ‘for your benefit’, a hacker living in their parent’s basement or a tyrannical government with an illegal warrant. They can either try to break in and steal your information or coerce you into giving it up. With hardcopies you may be able to come up with some clever hiding place to reduce the risk of your information being found or coerced out of you, but once it’s on a computer protecting it becomes a lot harder. The goal of this article is to provide a method of hiding and protecting your sensitive information from a lot of different risk scenarios, as well as providing you with some ‘plausible deniability’ in the event you’re forced to give up things like passwords.
One of the most common methods for protecting sensitive information on computers is encryption, which basically translates your data into unreadable characters; you need to know the secret password (referred to as the ‘key’) to translate it into something readable and usable. One of the biggest weaknesses of this approach is that you can potentially be coerced using either force or other more subtle means into giving up your key, giving the person, group or agency doing the coercing full access to everything you’re trying to protect. The method I’ll be discussing provides a capability to give the coercer a password that provides access to a completely different set of decoy files while still protecting your actual critical files.Continue reading“Fade to Gray: Files and Documents – Part 1, by J.M.”