
The law is much worse than worthless.  It gives police the power to put
innocent people in jail because they (the police) find something they don't
understand.  Most police don't know what the return key does, never mind the
difference between a core file and classified military secrets.

There are plenty of scenarios where the user would have no idea what something
is either.  It could be uninitialized junk.  The burden of proof is on the
user to show that it's something a normal upstanding citizen should have.  No
one should ever be put in that situation, especially in America.

What's disgusting about this is how easily most people go along with it, to
provide a bargaining chip against some hypothetical *alleged* child molester
or drug dealer, or whatever bad thing is in style at the time.  Basically most
people don't have a clear distinction between criminals and suspects.

As an analogy, it's like they find a loose screw in your house, and they
insist that you're building a bomb or machine gun.  They ask you where it came
from (like you'd know), and ask you to prove your claim.  When you explain it
in such simple terms, people may start to get the idea.

As a matter of fact, i do keep random files on my disk.  The reason is,
without special-purpose hardware, it takes a long time to generate good random
bits.  I have programs that crank out a couple bits per minute, which is
pretty conservative, but over time that's more than i need.

If you think about it, there's no point in actually encrypting random data,
because it just gives you different random data.  If you want some data to
look like an encrypted file, you just put an appropriate header on it.  If
enough people do this, some of them will be put in jail.

When you get arrested and the police ask for your keys, you can tell them it's
just random junk, although of course they won't believe you.  While you're
sitting in jail, you can take consolation in the fact that the government will
burn a few CPU-years trying to find something that's not there.
