Why is root authentication required to mount volumes on an internal drive but not on external drives?

These are simple FAT and Ext4 LUKS volumes-- not system partitions, etc.

Mostly for safety reasons. Quoting the design document:

It is REQUIRED no trace is left on local storage devices unless the user explicitly asks for it: the PELD MUST take care not to use any filesystem or swap volume that might exist on the host machine hard drives.

Comment by Tails Sun 14 Oct 2012 09:12:30 PM CEST