Cryptography Success Story. From Brazil: the moral, of course, is to choose a strong key and to encrypt the entire drive, not just key files. [Schneier on Security]

The files were encrypted using Truecrypt and an unnamed algorithm, reportedly based on the 256-bit AES standard. In the UK, Dantas would be compelled to reveal his passphrase under threat of imprisonment, but no such law exists in Brazil.

The Brazilian National Institute of Criminology (INC) tried for five months to obtain access to the encrypted data without success before turning over the job to code-breakers at the FBI in early 2009. US computer specialists also drew a blank even after 12 months of efforts to crack the code, Brazil’s Globo newspaper reports.

I use TrueCrypt to protect the Windows laptop I use for work. Unfortunately, the Mac version doesn’t support whole disk encryption.

How To Talk So The Government Can’t Listen. Part 1: how to encrypt your e-mail in Gmail with GPG (for use with Gmail or other web mail interfaces on Firefox in Windows) [Rad Geek People’s Daily]

A good detailed tutorial on how to use GPG to protect your email within Gmail. The parts dealing with key management are Windows-specific — the state of Mac support for GPG is considerably inferior and Linux support (at least in the Ubuntu distribution) is better, but the details are different.