Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
There’s no reason to store the actual knowledge—at least, only the person who wants it hidden needs to keep a copy. You make a document containing a description of the information to be concealed—both parties get a hash and only the blackmailee gets a copy of the document. Then you just store a hash in the contract, and if the contract is ever broken, then you show the original document to prove they are liable.
Presumably, the amount a reasonable person would be willing to pay me for concealing a certain piece of information would reflect their confidence in my ability to reliably conceal that information. It isn’t guaranteed, of course, but we routinely sign contracts for delivery of service in nonguaranteed scenarios.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
If a reasonable person is one that requires better information security than that used for national security information then I recommend they avoid situations pertaining to blackmail.
Thomblake described the sort of security protocol I had in mind.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
There’s no reason to store the actual knowledge—at least, only the person who wants it hidden needs to keep a copy. You make a document containing a description of the information to be concealed—both parties get a hash and only the blackmailee gets a copy of the document. Then you just store a hash in the contract, and if the contract is ever broken, then you show the original document to prove they are liable.
Presumably, the amount a reasonable person would be willing to pay me for concealing a certain piece of information would reflect their confidence in my ability to reliably conceal that information. It isn’t guaranteed, of course, but we routinely sign contracts for delivery of service in nonguaranteed scenarios.
If a reasonable person is one that requires better information security than that used for national security information then I recommend they avoid situations pertaining to blackmail.
Thomblake described the sort of security protocol I had in mind.