I was curious about that, so I looked it up. Pretty interesting stuff.

[0] "On the afternoon of October 1, 2013, officers watched as Ulbricht entered the library and made his way up the stairs to work by the window at a desk in the science fiction section, Kiernan recalled. Meanwhile, sitting on a bench outside of the library, homeland security officer Jared Der-Yeghiayan — who had been working undercover as Silk Road employee "cirrus" — initiated a chat with Ulbricht, requesting that he log in to Silk Road's back end to fix a technical problem. As soon as Der-Yeghiayan could confirm that Ulbricht was logged into the site, FBI agents entered the library.

Two plainclothes FBI agents, one male and one female, walked up behind Ulbricht and began arguing loudly. This staged lovers' tiff caught Ulbricht's attention long enough to distract him from his laptop. As soon as Ulbricht looked up, the male agent reached down and slid the computer over to his female colleague, who quickly snatched it up and handed it over to Kiernan for further investigation."

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/ross-ulbricht-will-be-sentenc...

If they made a movie about Snowden, they will surely made a movie about this.

Yup: http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/14/13290460/coen-brothers-si...

American Greed episode on Silk Road:

http://www.cnbc.com/live-tv/american-greed/full-episode/silk...

There was a similar, bar less dramatic, case in the UK recently - where police swiped the phone from the hands of a suspect as he took a call, and then kept interacting with the screen to keep it unlocked long enough to recover the evidence required.

In retrospect, it's a pretty obvious attack vector.

A dead man's switch with a very short time-out would make that kind of attack a lot harder.

For the extremely security-conscious, it could even be a kind of fail-deadly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-deadly) feature that wipes the phone.

See, this is the problem with people's conception of FDE. This is actually a very silly solution to the problem.

The right approach is to recognize what FDE is good at (minimizing the risk that casual thieves will get data in addition to valuable parts, and protecting computers that can frequently be powered all the way off from even advanced attackers), and then use something better to protect sensitive data.

https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill Checks for changes with USB drives and shuts down the computer and optionally deletes files and wipes ram. USB stick on a wristband > unplugs when they take the computer > shuts down

>the attacker will simply wait until the laptop is unlocked.

A potential counter measure is for the machine to periodically encrypt itself again and prevent use until a password/key is supplied ("clamming up"). This would prevent an attacker who snatched a logged-into computer from having unbounded carte blanche access to the machine. I'm envisioning something that every 10 minutes locks itself.

Does anyone know of such a solution?

A screen saver (w/ require password & possible full hibernation with memory flush)?

That's defeated by a USB mouse jiggler [1], which is apparently commonly used by the type of people who seize computers in the wild.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/CRU-Inc-30200-0100-0011-WiebeTech-Jig...

Yes, my idea was a intension counter measure to 'mouse' jigglers.

I think they are talking about a system that unconditionally asks for the password every 10 minutes even while the computer is in active use.