An idea about intellectual property and government surveillance

Watching this week's Frontline episode, on government surveillance, a thought occurred. The framing device of the show is that the FBI got mistaken wind of a terrorist plot to hit Las Vegas at New Year's, and so they went to all the casinos, requested via national security letter a blanket download of all the hotel's records of their current guests, and got it. One of the points made was that, while they might only need to use this data at the time, it doesn't go away after it's used. It sits in the FBI's possession for as long as, say, the CD-Rs it was transported on exist, and so that data can be used and misused far into the future.

But why can't it go away? The entertainment industry has invested a lot of time and effort into technology that makes data go away, or at least become unusable, after a particular period of time. In their case, it's media files, which lose their license at a certain point, and are thereafter (theoretically) unplayable. Why not do the same thing with data? Before private companies give the FBI digital data, they could be legally required to first pass it through a converter that would encrypt the information and put it all in a format that would require validation by an external site and would become unusable after a given, spcified period of time. If an objection is raised that putting it in a non-standard format would handicap investigations, a provision could be included that the requestee has to also provide the requestor with the immediate results of any data searches that cannot wait.

Is this a solution? Of course not. For one thing, it doesn't address the fact that the government really shouldn't be getting all this information from private companies, and as has been abundantly demonstrated, copy protection is easily breakable. But it at least requires some effort to break. Whereas, under the current system, all an agent has to do is pop the CDR back in their drive--or just do a search on a central database--now there would be some actual effort, i.e. conscious lawbreaking, in order to (mis)use private data after the initial inquiry. It has the additional advantage of using technology people are actually familiar with, and it doesn't actually prohibit government agencies from acquiring information, which is a touchy subject. It just regulates how they use it, in a way that doesn't require constant oversight.

Just a thought.

Labels: politics, value added

posted by Mike B. @ 3:29 AM