I know the world probably doesn’t need another privacy-secure filesystem, but I’m going to suggest one, anyway. As you can tell from the title, it’s called DamageFS.

The purpose of this set up is to purposely destroy the filesystem whenever the power goes down, either accidentally, or on purpose. This could be used when, for example, the police who raid your house fail to shutdown your Linux box, thus producing errors on the disk eliminating incriminations. These errors would be strategically placed as to render the filesystem inoperable, and corrupt any file signatures normally found.

As for implementation, I forsee a simple 1GB USB keychain holding all this magical data. When you install the driver you ‘pollute’ the drive, by destroying specific information on the disk, and copy these elusive omissions onto your keychain and in memory as normal. But remember, they are no longer on the disc – it is kept solely in RAM while the machine is kept switched on. The UPS keeps it safe during normal work hours, but any attempt to move the PC results in non-evidence as the drive decides to crash and burn. The evidence has been destroyed, important point 1. And it was due to the incompetence of the remover, important point 2.

If you suspect you’re about to get busted, it’s a simple matter of destroying the pen drive. Which snaps easier, and simpler to access, than a hard drive in a police van.

p.s. you can also support mount/unmount facilities that will dumped backups of the magic data.

p.p.s. I haven’t written DamageFS. It’s just a gedanken experiment.

p.p.p.s. Similarly, I am not a criminal, nor am I advocating criminal behaviour, it’s just the best example I could think of !