Some time ago, the US approved one of the worst anti-privacy legislations in existance, basically giving border guards the right to search, without warrant or evidence, Laptops and other storage devices.
This is might not sound important but it has implications that until now, those were legally concidered as an "extension of your memory".
Now, suppose someone has naked pictures of his girlfriend there okay? He doesn't feel like having every, goverment paid employee who got a uniform and sees hismelf as master of all he surveys, gawk. Still, he can always delete the pictures and store them "in his memory".
But this questions, if our "external memory" is not respected, then what would happen if hypothetical someone created a device with the ability to read neurons?
Essentially then, what these guys say, is that They want some piece of Your Life, and if you don't give it they will take some other piece (eg in terms of time, restriction of movement etc, whatever happens if you do the sin of REFUSING) and your only choise is between destroying your memories, aka this part of your life, or sharing it with them.
Now, neural scanners don't exist, so let's see what someone can do for his good old exocortex magnetic memory. :twisted:
Encryption.
Encryption is usually based on the principle that some things are easy to do one way (eg, multiplying two numbers together) but difficult the other way (dividing and getting the original numbers, if you don't know with what to divide), and there are encryption techniques out there, that not even governments with all their supercomputers and all their taxes and fanfares can break.
However, if someone did that, I'd advice to actually take the concept a little bit further. You see, one problem with encryption, is that someone can simply start breaking your kneecaps until you tell him the password. In fact, liberty lover as I might be, I think that realistically most people would break at just being talked at with a strong voice, being delayed for a whole day and not given food. And they know it.
So instead, someone can do what it is called, deniable encryption.
That's when you, say, encrypt your personal data in a way that looks no different than other random noise and can be proven as encrypted (plausible deniability), as opposed to something that asks you for a password as you open it, augmented by a "fake" encrypted sector/partition/disk/OS full of fake personal files, the password to which you will be annoyed to give out.
Another government measure useless.
