A thought off the top of my head... Can the digital lock provisions be used to protect personal communications? People are very worried about eavesdropping/profiling of their online activity-- wouldn't applying a 'digital lock' of even a trivial sort make place the eavesdroppers outside the law?

Obviously, strong encryption can protect your communications. But this is potentially something different-- you aren't guaranteeing the security of your communication, but rather, shifting the legal burden of violation onto some of the parties who sought to create the law in the first place...

For example, what if your bittorrent tracker information is protected by a digital lock?

You use the full-disk encryption, so you don't have this problem.

You're serious about protecting your porn...

Absolutely true. And much of the software is nearly unusable by anyone else-- it was built by the researchers to validate their own work, not to be used by others. If you've ever tried to use any code generated by grad students, it is often buggy, brittle, inflexible, indecipherable, etc... (I'm a late-stage PhD student, so I've run into this MANY times...) And that's the code that the researchers saw fit to release to the public-- imagine what the stuff that wasn't released looks like.

What the hell does that mean, anyway? People throw that phrase around, and I guess you have an idea of what they are getting at, but as a claim, isn't it problematic?

Its enormously popular, and (to some) provides a lot of value... and its free. What did you THINK they were going to do with the info you have up there ? It's a massive social engineering/data mining study, and you're taking part in it.

I'm not sure that it's as well thought out as you might believe...