You don't know what you are talking about. If you are worried about what is practical instead of what is secure then you are in the wrong line of work. Also encryption is your friend and it works just as well on a hard disk as it does on a USB. Linux on a pen drive is a good idea but all of the preconfigured live operating systems I have seen are toys when it comes to security. There are a lot of security toys. Not having an encrypted disk means you are in big troubles. You wont have a life when you are traced by the DEA when they exploit a firefox vulnerability. If the same attacker couldn't break out of your virtualization systems hypervisor or pwn the Tor application you will really be kicking yourself in the ass when you are in prison. No your solution of using linux on a pen drive is not inherently more secure. Of course you could have a pen drive that has a linux host on it and still use layers of isolation. Why not, you encrypt your HDD don't you? I fail to see the difference between an encrypted HDD and an encrypted USB drive that you mention. There are differences with security implications, but in these cases HDD is more secure. If you know what you are doing, encryption used on HDD and on USB drive will offer the same security, there is no 'of course this would be stupid' about it. Also you are correct in your description of isolation, but the goal of virtualization being used in the way I mention is not so much to prevent incriminating data from being stored on the host system (lthough it will help with this also) but rather to prevent an attacker who pwns one of your internet facing applications from spreading to other applications or items of interest / getting to the host OS. That is the main security benefit of using virtualization like this imo. Encryption and data destruction programs have the main goal of preventing incriminating information on your HDD from being gathered by an attacker. No the main purpose of using isolation like this is to protect from hacking threats. There is an added advantage that it contains incriminating data, but you should be using encryption and data destruction programs for the purpose you mention. You are protecting from hackers. It is just as likely users of SR will be targeted as it is that users of a given carder or any other illegal forum will be targeted. Carders say the same shit about drug forums. Everyone uses cognitive defense mechanisms when they are putting their life on the line, but a truly smart person will try to not do this because it weakens security. Yes the threat exists for all internet users but the users here are far more likely to be targeted with sophisticated technical attacks than the average internet user is. Sure they will a statistic is a statistic. Plus buyers here are probably parts of IRL drug networks. Government agencies exist to fund themselves. The agents get pay checks regardless of who they bust. They are looking for numbers. SR has a large number of drug users on it and it offers a conveniant way to target large numbers of people because it is centralized in many ways. Please get out of your cognitive defense mechanisms and your distorted view of government and police before it lands your ass in jail. Government agencies don't spend resources they steal resources from the people. The government will be very happy to say they need to steal a few extra million tax dollars to bust the users on Silk Road and the personal users who are busted will be talked about as international drug traffickers who are part of a major drug network that uses military grade technology to evade police and launder money etc. When you read of big busts in the news etc in many of those cases the people actually busted are fairly small time but the stories are played up so much and so dramatized that it paints a false picture. If you make any subset of drug dealers based on any characteristic you can say that they are a small percentage of the total drug dealing population, but obviously drug dealers are targeted and sent to prison. So your entire logic is flawed. Don't underestimate your adversary.