It's illegal but laws aren't currently enforced, so I don't know why you're bringing the law up.

Let's perform a natural experiment: keep saying reappropriation is illegal, and then wait for the executive to do it anyway. Then watch to see if Congress gives a fuck, by impeaching the executive (or credibly threatening to impeach if the embezzled funds aren't returned in n hours).

My hypothesis is that Congress won't do anything about it, and is fine with whatever new powers that the president decides he wants.

What's your hypothesis?

Surprise: we're actually going to do that experiment. In fact, we started it last year.

It's not in society's interests, but it is in government's interests. Society and government are orthogonal teams who often conflict with each other. In the US, we spelled that out explicitly in the late 1700s, but docs go back at least as far as the Magna Carta.

Alas, "spelling out" government limitations isn't the same thing as believing limits are a good idea and enforcing them, as we're occasionally reminded. The Constitution is just ink on a page, until people give a fuck about it. And in America, the constitution is currently very unpopular. Society wants to surrender to government, or if it doesn't want that, it's sure acting like it wants that.

That's pretty neat!

The danger with using unallocated space, is that sometimes you might accidentally overwrite it. But if that happens, I guess it just means you need to figure out what your new size needs to be, make a new hidden volume, and then restore from backup. It's that last step that I never remember as a possibility, probably due to my horrible backup habits. ;-)

I think that might be a bad idea, because when thugs say "hand over your phone" and you hand them a brand new phone that you have apparently never used, you're going to get wrench-based cryptanalysis. You need to be able to hand them the keys to a realistic environment that looks like it's being used. Thugs wanna see recent timestamps.

Ideally, we need to have some casual, boring (but constantly-touched!) environment that can launch encrypted environments, but somehow not have anything that references those environments.

The biggest problem I see is storage allocation. We need to be able to plausibly deny the existence of something, but also keep it from being overwritten by not-denied environments. How do you hide "don't write to these blocks, because something else uses them"?

Some might suggest hiding in plain sight with steganography, but at some point thugs will notice that everyone they suspect, just happens to have an unnecessarily-large gigaphoto. ;-)

Having alt environments that are detectable, but can be quickly destroyed the way you suggest, might be a decent compromise as long as it keeps an innocent and recently-used one around as cover. You enter the oh-fuck PIN, and it logs you into the innocent host environment but then it immediately deletes its encrypted guests, leaving you with a truly innocent machine as far as anyone can tell. And then you just really hope you can enter that duress code (or you can trick thugs into entering it) before they image your storage.

"National Security" means anything the government wants. Anything you would consider to be an abuse, they would consider to be within bounds, because there are no bounds.

>What's a better solution, if any?
 
Open source firmware

We pay money to get less energy?

Trump is confusing plus signs with minus signs. Does he need an eye exam, or a mental exam, or what?

The story here has nothing to do with sympathy; it's about incompetence.

"You used a n^2 query on a billions-of-records database?!"

"Well, yeah, but it's ok because the only people who use it are assholes."

That the victims of the breathalyzer's incompetent implementation happen to be people I mistrust, doesn't make the breathalyzer's makers look any less incompetent. They had one job, and they failed.

Chuck Norris is admittedly hard to beat in combat, but Bruce Schneier is NP-hard.

Chuck Norris once threw some scrambled eggs at Bruce Schneier, so Bruce unscrambled them and threw them back.

Chuck Norris was once proud, seeing his work featured at a theater. That is, until Bruce Schneier came along and showed it was security theater.

Chuck Norris once opened fire on Bruce Schneier, but nothing can ever get through Bruce's firewall.

When Chuck Norris anesthetized Bruce Schneier, he made Bruce recite the digits of pi backwards from the end.

Chuck Norris once forgot his password, so he asked Bruce Schneier to decrypt it from the "x" in /etc/passwd.

Chuck Norris once tried to use a hand grenade to blow Bruce Schneier into insignificant bits, but it didn't work because Bruce's bits were all most significant.