Every quarter of a year, worried postings appear about governments and law enforcement on the hard disk encryption mailing list I'm subscribed to. The solutions are different every time but the problem stays the same: "Rubberhose attacks". This term is an elegant description of the attack path that works without ever touching cryptography: torture. Torture involving a rubberhose is unlikely to occour in modern socities. Nonetheless, there are equally effective measures if needed. This fear gives rise to ideas like this: "The data should be destroyed when I type a special panic passphrase" or "store the hard disk encryption key on CD and break the CD when in trouble" or "stripe the partition of any sign of encryption header". They have the same goal: remove intention to torture the key owner. To save a bit of your time I take this shortcut: THEY ARE ALL BROKEN and to figure out why is left as an exercise to the reader. Instead, you need