One of the things I have learned from the rash of thefts of laptops with private customer information is that most of this could have been averted if the hard drive or file had been encrypted. I’ll show you how to encrypt your home directory with Mac OSX’s built in encryption technology.
Encryption is one thing no government wants it’s citizens to have. In fact there have been several attempts to ensure that encryption technology is not used by the citizens of this country or any country. During Clinton’s term, he attempted to get encryption above 48 bit classified as munitions and subject to export restrictions. He also wanted a clipper chip to be installed in every computer that would inject a breakable algorithm into any encryption. Then he wanted everyone to have public and private keys, and then have the private key placed in an escrow account where it could be accessed by law enforcement with proper due process.
Law enforcement wants to do away with due process, because it is so hard to protect the people with it. Sorry, not buying that. I want government out of my business, and therefore I encrypt my files. People argue that if I did nothing wrong, then I should not need to encrypt. Sorry, the government is one source of intrusion that I wish to prevent, the others are my competitors and just generally mosy neighbors. /soapbox
Mac OSX had had the capability to protect your home directory with encryption for some time now. It’s called FileVault, and it will use your log in password to encrypt your home directory. It encrypts you home directory with the Advanced Encryption Standard(AES) using a 128 bit key. This is the same standard used by the Federal government. Remember that no government official can force you to give up your password.
To use FileVault you need to be logged into your account and access the system preferences, the security pane. Click on the FileVault section. If you know the admin password for the computer you may wish to set a master password. This will allow the recovery of login passwords that you may have forgotten. Then turn on FileVault. You’ll be logged out, and when you log in your Home directory will be encrypted on disk.
Some applications may react wierd to a FileVault enabled file. So move files to another drive if you need to use them unencumbered with encryption. I would move your iTunes library to another drive, at the bare minimum. Also rmember that the more files it has to encrypt the longer the encrypt will take for the activation. Once you’re past that, encryption should be done in the background.
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