I’ve been pondering about about some problems that (all?) Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have, where users are not particularly worried about the nature of material they are sharing. In short, you want to prevent the MPAA or RIAA (sp?) from getting your IP address if you share something they think they own the rights to.
The idea now is: Encrypt a bit of known data (say the requesting host’s IP) and your own IP (making sure the return address of the packet itself is masqueraded through a number of others hosts) w/ something that is reasonably easy to brute force (say 16 bit DES or even more interesting: use the Content Scrambling System (CSS) used on DVDs as there are many brute force attacks for that requiring only 5 bytes of plaintext). Now the requester has to reverse-engineer a protection measure for digital content (indirectly) and the DMCA would apply should the requester want to know the IP where the file is available. So the prosecutors themselves are provably breaking they law (there seem to be some exceptions, though: See the Elcom / Dmitri Sklarov (sp?) case where some FBI agents weren’t playing by the book…) ^_^
I am not a lawyer. All of the above may be incorrect, illegal, immoral, or anything else that starts w/ “im”.