Is WD My Book Essential's Encryption Safe

[miroki]

I live under a dictatorship regime and the last thing I want is to have my govt accessing my personal data.

Now I need an external drive to backup my data. WD Essential looks a solid and affordable product for me. I don't care for harddrive's encryption ability since I've been using BitLocker, TrueCrypt and DiskCrypt to protect all my data. But this Essential drive comes with hardware encryption and I want to use it to make my investment worthwhile.

Now my question is: if my password is safe (say, it's complicated enough and I don't tell it to another soul), can I trust the hardware encryption of that drive? to be specific, can the govt find a way(eg, pcb swap or use the data reading from the pcb) to access my data without me giving away my password?

I am new to this forum and admitedly haven't done any research. but anyway, I'd appreciate your quick and straightforward reply. Thanks!

[digitalferret]

I live under a dictatorship regime

Dictatorship? checkout a democracy

google:
government nsa backdoor into encryption
government agency backdoor spyware etc etc etc

http://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdo ... tole-keys/

These methods, part of a highly secret program codenamed Bullrun, have included pressuring vendors to install backdoors in their products to allow intelligence agencies to access data, and obtaining encryption keys by pressuring vendors to hand them over or hacking into systems and stealing them.