How secure is your data?

Fascanting what impact this potential solution to piracy could have on everyones' data.

Looking at this logically they are proposing to monitor all traffic to ensure pirated material isn't being transmitted. OK in the first instance there will be the observation it will be certain types of packets that are inspected but surely the pirate "publishers" and "consumers" will start to mask packets to hide the data or encrypt it via VPN style tunnels.

Leading to the ultimate solution that all packets would need to be inspected to spot the illegal activity. Just a thought but where is the processing power for this going to come from?

Step back a little further though and rewind through history to the 80's. Pirating was rife and "home taping is killing music" (apparently), although it looks far from dead despite what's happened since then with CD's and Bittorrent. Did anyone from the music industry suggest feeling letters in the post to see if they had a tape in them and if they did opening the envelope to see if it was a home taping? What sort of outcry would have ensued if that had been suggested? When the hope tapers ended up masking the tapes in boxes and obscure shapes would all post have been opened....just in case. Like processing power now who would have funded the countless staff needed to perform this task?

This proposal all though well intended is fundementall flawed in both its ability to be executed and also the implication to both privacy and security of data.