i thought that when the PGP guy gave up his technology the government put a back door in it like they did with the security certificate companys, thawte and verisign. Could be wrong.

Truecrypt, eraser, dban.

With truecrypt you can do some clever stuff such as invisible archives, full disk encryption etc. There is a story about an encrypted Pc, not the best subject matter, but a young man in the UK is accused of having child porn on his PC. It has an archive on it and as far as I know the guy is still in jail for refusing to provide the pasword to the archive and the police haven't been able to crack it. The story is probably a couple years old now and the guy have been in jail almost a year by then. As I said, not the best subject. I fully expected the cops just to plant some stuff on there and get on with it.

Eraser will clean disks of readable data. Just because you deleted a file doesnot mean it cannot be forensically recovered. Eraser has several option for disk overwrite. I believe the ideal number of times to overwrite data is about 24 times to ensure it cannot be recovered. It can take a long time to do 24 writes on a whole disk.

dban. Need to check this name. It is basically a disk nuker. You can hit this app and it will trash your hard drive as fast as it can. I think you can run it silently.