love to see it

"Real" people? Are there fake people?

That would be impressive but I bet it would be the most disappointing bite.

They're needed just to hold the massive encryption key, I'm assuming.

back before the days of hard drives being a standard thing :)

Youngster. Bet you've never even seen an 8" floppy IRL. And don't get me started on tape or punch cards...

51/4 cardboard floppy

Wait, I'm also old enough to remember 5.25" floppies, but I always thought the casings were some sort of flexible plastic. Were some of them just card stock, or were they all some sort of treated paper product?

I have to admit, that I never looked into the technical details of full disk encryption

If I understand you correctly, they are using the same key for all the data and with larger amounts of data statistical analysis becomes feasible
Did I get this right?

Couldn't that be solved by using a root key + salt per block/sector/file/whatever?

I'd still only need the one root key and with every block the actual encryption key changes

I was thinking about perfect forward secrecy and that was the first thing, I could come up with

But, I'm absolutely not a crypto/math guy, so probably I don't know enough to really add something to the discussion/solution...

At the current rate of development, every city will have its own space heater data center, so with all that computational power available to just any maligned local city government dignitary, you're right to be concerned.

I assume this is not something I need to worry about with 1TB drives at all? That's a pretty cool fact about cryptography/data storage I did not know, thanks for sharing

With all the data retention and logging requirements being imposed by various governments, your "joke" might not be so far off.