Dave's Bit Bucket

DRM and the Law of Unforseen Consequences

There's another very good reason why DRM in both media and the enterprise is likely to fail, and it goes all the way to national and foreign intelligence and security services.

Despite what you see in the movies, much intelligence work is pretty mundane - get feeds of as many TV channels and as much printed or otherwise-circulated news media from around the world as possible, translate (where necessary) and analyse them, and pass anything deemed "interesting" (either from personal initiative or based on a list of "things to look out for") up the chain. I don't know how much Internet-based content is monitored right now, but given the timeliness of posting and detail of various blogs written by residents of Baghdad, Israel, Palestine etc, I'd be very surprised if a whole bunch of such data wasn't included today.

Now, consider what happens if DRM gets thrown into the mix.

All of a sudden, the need arises for such monitoring and intelligence services to be able to strip the DRM control away from the content. If the content can't be readily "passed up the chain" and potentially made available in multiple copies for examination and discussion by The Powers That Be, and maybe also archived in perpetuity as evidence (not to mention potentially being made available under the Freedom of Information Act at some future date), then Trouble arises. So, monitoring services need to either:

• coerce DRM vendors to include a "back door" which will enable them to easily strip DRM from content - a situation which would look remarkably similar to the Clipper key escrow fiasco and would probably end the same way
• raise their computing resources game to brute-force the DRM protections
• do something else I've not thought of yet

...since they can't necessarily do a simple exploit of the "analogue hole" by pointing a video camera at a monitor showing a legitimately-decrypted feed (after all, they wouldn't want to make a legitimate subscription to some monitored services, in order to ensure that the owners of the service couldn't determine that they were being monitored).

Also, depending on how you look at it, the Freedom of Information Act could be considered as "legislation which prohibits or places very onerous limits on Government use of DRM technology"... but that may be another posting in itself :-).

(2006-11-09 03:53:47.0) Permalink Comments [0]