Hello! I have some questions about police house searches. Please be aware that I don't participate in any contraband or illegal activities, nor I expect a house search in the future. I'm asking this out of curiosity because I'm a privacy-aware person. I would like to know how thoroughly police officers perform house searches after they obtain a court warrant. Suppose they raid my premises to confiscate digital storage devices like computers, external HDDs, CDs, DVDs, USB Flash keys, cellphones, etc to gather evidence. Now suppose I have something to hide from them. Let's say it's the ultra-cool JPG pictures from my sister's wedding or maybe the super-secret TXT love letters that I wrote for my girlfriend or perhaps my cousin's uber-awesome family AVI videos. Basically it's just some data that needs to be hidden away, doesn't really matter what the contents are. I'll simply refer to it as "data" from now on. Now here's the question. How can I prevent the hardware with my "data" from being confiscated? I am skilled at using cryptography to prevent data access, but it's the hardware I'm worried about. A lot of people obviously suggest to take the hardware off-site. Why keep the hard disk at home and risk it getting seized when I can simply take it to another location and not worry about a potential house search? I find this solution has one ugly drawback - I can no longer easily access any of the content. This finally brings us to the point of my thread. Is there any way to store the hardware at home with sufficient confidence that the police are going to overlook it while performing the search? I.E. what if I had a NAS (network attached storage) plugged onto my home LAN network at some hidden location in my basement. Let's say I placed the disks underneath the staircase in my basement and barricaded it with a concrete/brick wall. Then I put some furniture in front of it to make it look like there's nothing there. I also hid the power lines and the lan cable well. Would they find such hidden device? How? Do they connect their computers to my LAN and try to scan the network to see whether there are any devices still attached to the local network? Are they going to follow the ethernet wires to find and locate the device? What if the ethernet cable went directly into the concrete floor, and there's no way to figure out where the wire leads without breaking apart (destroying) a large part of the building? Are they going to break the concrete wall to access the device once they know its there? What if I hid a networked storage, but this time use a WiFi to connect to it? Are they going to suspect anything? If they confront me, I exercise my right to remain silent.
accessing large files online gets rather boring when you're on a slow internet connection. And no, my country has no decryption laws like the UK (RIPA).
