Way too complicated IMO, especially for a company owned laptop which a big IT department will happily replace without question. Whole disk encryption (trucrypt, PGP, whatever) with a real passphrase, and if a US citizen, plan to refuse to give up the password and abandon the laptop to CBP. If the passphrase isn't good enough for you or you think you'll cave in, require a key file that is kept on a thumb drive while traveling with a copy at home in the States, and destroy the thumb drive prior to arrival.

They can try as long as they want to crack AES256 (again assuming a good password is used). If the government has the resources needed to actually do that, they're not going to waste them on my laptop.

The only problem I see with this strategy is that CBP will likely retaliate against the passenger by confiscating their cell phone, ipod, camera flash cards, and any other digital storage. My only real worry coming back from a trip--losing my pictures--isn't easy to fix because it's hard to upload gigabytes of photos to online storage. On the flight back to the US, I have been known to copy reduced-size photos onto a single flash card and conceal it somewhere in my luggage that would require a tear-apart search to find.

It's a shame we have to discuss this in 2011. Oh, and some of us feel the Tea Party has much more respect for things like personal freedom than non-tea-partiers of both political parties. I suspect we can agree that neither Bush nor Obama have done personal freedom any favors. The Tea Party seems more libertarian than Republican to me.