Quote from: audacity on February 29, 2012, 09:19 pmQuote from: John Keats on February 29, 2012, 02:42 pmQuote from: blackend646 on February 29, 2012, 04:18 amThis seems like a great precaution to take. Provided that thus far I have been using tor on a normal OS installation, if I were to simply reformat my hard drive and start doing this linux on a USB stick method, would there still be any trace on my computer of my activities before I reformatted the hard drive?As long as you don't become the neighborhood kingpin, just reformatting the hard drive should suffice. If you're paranoid like the rest of us I would recommend reformatting that laptop and selling it on craigslist and getting yourself a new one (on which you would never use Tor of course).About this setup, however, the developer of liberte hasn't come out with any new versions recently and so it's a little slow... not to mention an old version of Tor. I'm going to look into an alternative setup (perhaps as simple as Ubuntu + TBB?) to post until he/she comes out with an update.I've been wondering this too- could you rather just securely erase all sensitive info then securely erase the empty space (i'm referring to macs particularly but also in general. Use the disk utility to wipe empty space with a 35 pass wipe? or do you actually need to wipe the whole thing even though the rest of the storage on the drive is being used by other data.Cheers, awesome info btw.In theory just watching a week worth of high definition blue ray movies should wipe your HD.In practice, it depends on how much the G-men want you, because little sections of your HD regularly fail and get overlooked in the future since they are not part of the memory that can be allocated by the OS anymore. So, computer forensics can look at those bad bits of the disk and work out what was originally there. More obviously, magnetic media has a kind of residual memory, where it can be worked out that although there was 1 there now, there used to be a 0.As Keats says, it really depends on how much 'they' want you. Ultimately the best HD wipe is physical destruction.