I'd like to take advantage of the hardware AES encryption present in many SSD implementations. But I have difficulty believing it's not back-doored.

I'm not doing anything nefarious, but these days law enforcement seems ever more determined to gin up evidence and argument to suit their purpose. Also, if they can use the back door, how long until a malicious third party can?

Let's hope the drive manufacturers have implemented the encryption correctly. Here's an example where makers of external drive enclosures didn't:

Enclosed but not encrypted: http://www.h-online.com/security/features/Enclosed-but-not-e...

But they could never use such a technique against a savvy tech user who knows that the erase command deletes the internal encryption key on an SSD. Using the technique in any court case would be tantamount to publicizing it and destroying the reputation of the hard drive manufacturer in question, as everyone would know a back door exists in their devices.

Never say never.

There would always be doubt, and some kind of parallel construction would surely be used to protect the secret technique.

I could see it being used in hundreds of cases per year for a decade before anyone could prove anything. Just like ubiquitous internet surveillance. And even when irrefutable proof surfaces, the very same people who staunchly said "that could never happen" will say "of course, how could you even be surprised?"

1 Parallel Construction

2 National security preventing your lawyer to ever see any evidence against you.

Both already being used in US.

don't forget US intelligence agencies don't need courts anymore.

It's probably something like an FCC compliance requirement.

Does your hard drive provide pointless-something-random functionality that RSA/NSA thought up? No? Well it's not allowed to be sold legally inside the United States, then. Please return with a properly functioning product.