Traveling with a laptop isn’t what it used to be. It’s not impossible to run into an overzealous customs officer who wants to take a closer look at what you have on your machine. There are also reports of machines being confiscated and not being returned.

I’m a little torn on the subject; if customs are on the lookout for people carrying child porn (and have a reasonable amount of evidence to justify the search) then I’m all for searching these machines, but at the same time it’s a real violation of our privacy.

There are also possible cases where they’ll be searching through documents on your machine that are part of a client confidentiality agreement. What if you are working on a multimillion dollar merger, and a customs officer starts reading your files? Who guarantees that he won’t mention it to someone else? Don’t think you can hand him an NDA before he starts his snooping.

Since everyone reading this blog is a nice and friendly law abiding citizen (you’d better be!) I’ll give you a very decent workable solution to safeguard your privacy; it’s called Truecrypt, and it creates extremely secure files that are encrypted on a level even the government will have a hard time cracking.

The program is easy to use and can be installed in a way that is almost impossible to detect on your machine. The first step is to create the Truecrypt file; you select the size you want the file to be, pick the encryption standard you want to apply to it, and give it a password. Truecrypt then "formats" that file.

You can name it whatever you want. I’d suggest something other than "reallysecretstuff". Naturally you’ll want to pick a very strong password.

Truecrypt also has a "traveler mode" which ensures no traces of the application are left on the PC. If you want a really secure setup, install Truecrypt to a USB drive (and not on the PC), give the Truecrypt file a nice nondescript name and store it hidden away on the machine.

Now, when you need to store files you want to keep private, simply mount the Truecrypt partition (it loads as a new drive letter), save what you need to it, and unmount when done.

Truecrypt is 100% free, is open source and will never become a commercial application. The source code is available for the really paranoid out there. If you decide to use Truecrypt, please consider making a donation so they can keep up the good work.

You can download it at Truecrypt.org