Road warrior security

I see that a group calling itself the Association of Corporate Travel Executives is warning its members to limit the amount of proprietary business information they carry on laptops and the like because they're afraid that government agents can seize that data at border crossings.

Excuse me if I grin a little at this. There must be thousands, tens of thousands, of laptops and USB drives stolen every day, and you're worried about border guards? Please, get a clue. Custom agents are the least of your worries.

The real problem is carrying any proprietary business data on a laptop. Of course, the guy who swipes your notebook is probably far more likely to fence it for a dime on the dollar of its list value than he is interested in finding out your sales forecasts for the Acme SuperJuicers or even looking to see if you have customers' credit card numbers. Still, the way I figure it, a common, every day thief is a lot more likely to look at your data than U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials.

In any case, you shouldn't have any unprotected proprietary information on your laptop. Or, for that matter, any unprotected data of any importance. Sooner or later someone in your company is going to lose their laptop. So, the way I see it, you have two choices. You can either 1) Not put any important data on the laptop-that's what secure network connections like SSL (Secure Socket Layers) and VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) are for. Or, 2) use some kind of encryption system.

I'm going to presume that most of you are going to opt for number two, if you elect to do anything except rely on luck to protect your data. If you look behind door number two, you'll see you get a choice between encrypting the entire hard drive or just certain files.

The hard drive encryption systems, like Microsoft's EFS (Encryption File System) or the newer BitLocker, which can encrypt an entire Windows volume, have always made me a bit nervous. Hard drives are always doing bad things to me, and anything that gets between my hard drive repair tools and repairing the drive makes me twitchy.

So, when I look for laptop security, I look to PGP's Desktop Professional. It can be used with both Windows and Mac laptops-no Linux darn it-and you can set it to encrypt on a partition basis. What I always do is to set up one partition for the operating system and applications and the other partition, the encrypted one, for data.

In addition, Desktop Professional encrypts most common Windows and Mac e-mail and IM connections. Since, generally speaking, I'm more worried about someone tapping into my online conversations than I am someone stealing and then trying to crack my hard drive, I appreciate this feature a lot.

In any case, please, forget about worrying over border guards. Common thieves and forgetfulness-did I just leave my laptop in the taxi??-are much more likely to give you trouble. Just encrypt your data and then you won't have to worry about it so much. Of course, you'll still need to explain whow you lost your corporate laptop to the boss, but that's another problem entirely.