What else can TCPA and Palladium be used for?
TCPA can also be used to implement much stronger access controls on confidential documents. For example, an army might arrange that its soldiers can only create Word documents marked at ‘Confidential’ or above, and that only a TCPA PC with a certificate issued by its own security agency can read such a document. This is called ‘mandatory access control’, and governments are keen on it. The Palladium announcement implies that the Microsoft product will support this: you will be able to configure Word so that it will encrypt all documents generated in a given compartment on your machine, and share it only with other users in a defined group. Corporations will be able to do this too, to make life harder for whistleblowers. They can arrange that company documents can only be read on company PCs, unless a suitably authorised person clears them for export. They can also implement timelocks: they can arrange, for example, that all emails evaporate after 90 days unless someone makes a positive
