This is effective against legal threats. I remember at least one case in my country where one person was saved by truecrypt. They even asked the FBI for help on decrypting it.

Hopefully civilization is not so far gone that police will imprison, torture or kill for failing to incriminate themselves. If it gets to the point cold-blooded torture is on the table, you'll probably get killed anyway.

That’s why it needs to be destructive. You can’t beat access to something out of someone if it has been deleted.

While true, they may beat you anyway just to be sure.

Big opportunity to implement a kill-switch if the microphone recognizes your screams!

> Here's a $5 hammer, hit him with it until he gives us what we're looking for, so goes the comic I saw once.

You are probably thinking of the $5 wrench in https://xkcd.com/538/

That's referred to as rubber hose cryptography.

That's also why Assange (and others) developed the Rubberhose file system[0].

It's based on the game theoretic idea that if your adversary has no way of knowing how many hidden partitions you have, then you have no way of proving to them that you've given them all your secrets.

As such, there is no benefit to you revealing any secrets under torture, because the torture would continue even after you've told them everything, therefore there is no point to them torturing you in the first place.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubberhose_%28file_system%29

"JOB OPPORTUNITY: Assassins and mercenaries required. Must be proficient in game theory".

In reality they will torture you until you stop decrypting partitions, and then a bit more of special torture, just in case.

If they don't understand game theory, that just means they will act sub-optimally. In any case, the correct strategy for the user is still to not decrypt any partitions, since, as you say, the sooner the user stops decrypting, the sooner the torturers give up.

I don't think either of has met someone who engages in actual torture, but I imagine they rarely, if ever, “give up”.

That seems like a pretty foolish assumption to make of your adversaries/captors.

If a torturer has good reason to believe you have valuable information regarding subject X, they'll simply torture you until they possess that information or you die. If you don't possess the information, you're screwed. If you do possess the information, it's likely that they'll stop after they get what they're after.

A state liable to torture you may simply kill you instead. Or torture you and kill you, even if it serves no particular purpose.

If you're in the business of protecting your secrets against torture then you need to also be protecting them against death because that is grimly inevitable.

"I don't think they wanted me to say anything. It was just their way of having a bit of fun, the swines."

That's not really making the case for clever crypto solutions. Assange is rotting in prison and is probably going to die in the US in the near future. What secret information could he be protecting at this point?