A couple of people would get beaten with the wrench the first few times it happened, but after a few weeks and a few high profile cases from Fortune 500 employees of "my CIO is the only one with the key", they'd move on to other targets or other methods.

How does the low paid border security drone even know you have a cloud storage account?

What country do you live in that has to worry about people being tortured to death on a frequent basis?

This stuff just doesn't happen often, despite what a silly XKCD comic would lead you to believe.

Encryption actually works pretty damn well, for basically all usecases that a normal person would come across.

The world is not a James Bond spy move.

You're not going to be tortured to death, but there are quite a few things that the government can do to make your life miserable.

The $5 wrench isn’t what most people have to worry about; it’s the 5-hour detention without charge.

5 hour detention is nothing - expensed vacation :)

Extraordinary rendition to the Guantanamo Bay is what concerns me.

Maybe also have some relatively uninteresting encrypted files which you can hand over in this situation?

I'm not saying any of this is likely. But, as the topic was raised, if they break you and you start talking, you will volunteer the information. They don't need to know before hand.

That said, the most practical scenario here is to keep your important files secured somewhere else, cloud or elsewhere, and when they ask you to unlock your phone or laptop you say "Sure!" Because there's nothing to find and you're compliant and helpful so they quickly let you go after a proforma search.

> The world is not a James Bond spy move.

Yeah, there is no James Bond outside the books and screen. But thermorectal cryptanalysis is out there and still beats most of cyphers with ease. And it's not letal!

But it will not work if you do not know the password. (It can also be time locked with false data; they don't know whether or not it is the real data.)