The U.S. government currently issues laws regarding the maintenance and/or destruction of documents, who can access them and when, and so on. With a court order, any company can be required to turn documents over to law enforcement.

What if we discover a “silver bullet” for electronic data storage, that allows for a single mechanism to store and retrieve all kinds of data across all kinds of hardware and software? (I’m thinking here of JavaSpaces in particular, but it might be some other technology that finally achieves this goal.)

What if that single mechanism were so ubiquitous that, instead of writing laws regarding data storage and retrieval, a government could simply write software that actually complied with those laws on behalf of a company? So instead of saying “your company must destroy all e-mails that are over one year old”, a government could say “your company must download and install Software X from us, which will destroy all e-mails that are over one year old”? Media companies could be ordered to run software that prevented minors from downloading R-rated movies, every music file could be deleted from my computer, and more and worse. And of course, identity thieves would have a field day, as a single worm could unlock every Social Security number in America.

I guess heterogeneous networks aren’t all bad…