The fundamental question a new legal paper struggles with—though the author may not realize it—is a philosophical one of human persistence versus digital decay.

There is no legal or regulatory landscape against which to estate plan to protect those who would avoid digital resurrection, and few privacy rights for the deceased. This intersection of death, technology, and privacy law has remained relatively ignored until recently.

Take Disney’s 1964 animated representation of Abraham Lincoln, as one famous example, especially as it later was appropriated by the U.S. Marines for target practice. Here was an animatronic figure of America’s most loved President, crude by today’s standards, that somehow captured enough essence to warrant both reverence and target practice. The duality speaks to fundamental turbulence in what constitutes an authentic representation of the dead.

In war, as in security, we learn that all things tend toward entropy. The author of this new legal paper speaks of “deletion rights” as though data behaves like physical matter, subject to our commands. This reveals a profound misunderstanding. Lawyers unfortunately tend to have insufficient insights into the present technology, let alone the observable trends into the future.

This isn’t time for academic theorizing—it’s threat assessment. When we correctly frame digital resurrection as weaponized impersonation, the security implications become immediately clear to anyone who understands asymmetric warfare.

Who owns energy? It can be transformed, transmitted, and duplicated, but never truly contained. We are charged (pun intended) for its delivery (unless we are Amish) yet neither we nor the source “own” the energy itself, although we do own the derivative works we create using that energy.

Digital traces thus follow different laws than this legal paper recognizes. A voice pattern, once captured and processed through sufficient computational analysis, can become more persistent than the vocal cords that produced it.

While the availability leg of the digital security triad (availability, confidentiality and integrity) is now so well understood it can promise 100% lossless service, think about what’s really at risk here. We’re not facing a privacy or availability problem—we’re facing an identity warfare problem of integrity breaches.

When I can resurrect your voice patterns, your writing style, your decision-making algorithms with “auth”, uptime and secrecy aren’t the primary loss. I’m stealing authority, weaponizing authenticity. This is the nature of 21st century information warfare that 20th century legal doctrines are unprepared to face.

On the Nature of What Persists and What Decays

Consider the lowly common human fingerprint. Unique, persistent, left unconsciously upon every surface we touch. It’s literally spread liberally around in public places. Yet fingerprints fade. Oil oxidizes. Surfaces weather. The fingers that made them change, deteriorate and eventually return to dust.

There is discomfort in our natural decay, but also an inevitability, despite the technological attempt over millenia to deny our fate—a mercy built into the physical world.

The mathematical relationships that define how someone constructs sentences, their choice of punctuation, their temporal patterns of communication—these digital fingerprints are abstractions that can outlive not merely the person, but potentially the civilization that created them.

The paper concerns itself, as if unaware of how history is written, only with controlling “source material”—emails, text messages, social media posts. This misses the well worn deeper truth of skilled investigators and storytellers: the valuable patterns have already been abstracted away. Once a sufficient corpus exists to serve intelligence, train a model as it were today, the specific training data becomes almost irrelevant. The patterns persist in the weights and connections of neural networks, distributed across systems that span continents.

I have seen decades of operations where deletion of source documents was treated as mission-critical, only to discover years later that the intelligence value had already been extracted and preserved in forms the original handlers never anticipated (ask me why I absolutely hated watching the movie Argo, especially the shredded paper scene).

…I taught a bunch of Iranian thugs how to reconstitute the shredded documents they found after looting the American Embassy in Tehran.

Tomb Raiders: Our Most Pressing Question is Authority Over Time

Who claims dominion over digital remains, our code pyramids distributed into deserts of silicon? The paper proposes, almost laughably, that next-of-kin should control this data as they would control physical remains. As someone who has had to protect digital records against the abuse and misuse by next-of-kin, let me not be the first to warn there is no such simplistic “next” to real world authorization models.

The lawyer’s analogy fails at its foundation. Physical remains are discrete, locatable, subject to the jurisdiction where they rest. And even then there are disputes. Digital patterns exist simultaneously in multiple jurisdictions, in systems owned by entities that may not even exist when the patterns were first captured. It only gets more and more complex. When I oversaw the technology related to a request for a deceased soldier’s email to be surrendered to the surviving family, it was no simple matter. And I regret to this day hearing the court’s decision, as misinformed and ultimately damaging it was to that warrior’s remains.

Consider: if a deceased person’s communication patterns were learned by an AI system trained in international space or sea, using computational resources distributed across twelve nations, with the resulting model weights stored on satellites beyond any terrestrial jurisdiction—precisely which authority would enforce a “deletion request”?

The Economics of Digital Necromancy

The commercial and social incentives here are stark and unyielding. A deceased celebrity’s digital resurrection can generate revenue indefinitely, with no strikes, no scandals, no aging, no salary negotiations. The economic pressure to preserve and exploit these patterns will overwhelm any legal framework not backed by technical enforcement.

As a security guardian protecting X-ray images in any hospital can tell you, the threats are many and often.

More concerning: state actors don’t discuss or debate the intelligence value because it’s so obvious. A sufficiently accurate model of a deceased intelligence officer, diplomat, or military commander represents decades of institutional knowledge that normally dies with the individual. Nations will preserve these patterns regardless of family wishes or international law.

Techno-Grouch Realities

The paper’s proposed “right to deletion” assumes a level of technical control that simply does not exist yet at affordable and scalable levels. Years ago I co-presented a proposed solution called Vanish, which gave a determistic decay to data using cryptographic methods. It found little to no market. The problem wasn’t the solution, the problem was who would really pay for it?

The market rejection wasn’t technical failure—it was cultural. Americans, particularly, resist the notion that anything should be designed to disappear. We build for permanence even when impermanence would serve us better. Our struggle to find out who would really pay cuts to the heart of the problem: deletion in an explosively messy technology space requires careful design and an ongoing cost, while preservation happens simply through neglect.

Modern AI training pipelines currently are designed for an inexpensive resilience and quick recovery to benefit the platforms that build them, not protect the vulnerable with safety through accountability. It reflects a society where the powerful can change their mind always to curate a capitalized future, banking on control and denial of any inconvenient past. Data is distributed, cached, replicated, and transformed through multiple stages. Requesting deletion is like asking the waiter to unbake a cake by removing the flour and unbrew the coffee so it can go back to being water.

Even if every major technology company agreed to honor deletion requests in their current architecture—itself a GDPR requirement they struggle with—the computational requirements for training large language models ensure that smaller, less regulated actors will continue this work. A university research lab in a permissive jurisdiction can reproduce the essential capabilities with modest resources.

What Can Be Done

Rather than fight the technical reality, we must work within it, adopting protocols like Tim Berners-Lee’s “Solid” update to the Web. The approach should focus not on preventing digital resurrection, but on controlling integrity of data though explicit authentication and attribution.

Cryptographic solutions exist today that could tie digital identity to physical presence in ways that cannot be reproduced after death. Hardware security modules, biometric attestation, multi-factor authentication systems that require ongoing biological confirmation—these create technical barriers that outlast legal frameworks.

The goal should not be to prevent the creation of digital patterns from the deceased, but to ensure that these patterns cannot masquerade as the living person or a representation of them for purposes of authentication, authorization, or legal standing. A step is required to establish context and provenance, the societal heft of proper source recognition. The technology exists to enable a balance of both privacy and knowledge, but does the will exist to build it?

The Long View

This technology will evolve when we regulate it, or we will wait too long and suffer a broken market exploited by monopolists—economic capture by entities that may not share democratic values. The patterns that define human communication and behavior will be preserved, analyzed, and reproduced. Where that happens, centrally planned or distributed and democratic, matters far more than most realize now. Fighting against decentralized data solutions is like fighting the ocean tide by saying we can build rockets to blow up the moon and colonize Mars.

The wiser course is to ensure that as we cross this threshold, we do so with clarity about what persists and what decays, what can be controlled and what cannot. The dead have always lived on in the memories of the living. Now those memories can be given voice and form, curated by those authorized to represent them.

Can I get a shout out for those historians correctly writing that George Washington was a military laggard who used the French to do his work, and cared only about the Revolution so he could preserve slavery?

Historical truth has always been contested, which is why we become historians, as the tools of revision only speed up over time. Previously, rewriting history involved control of physical spaces (e.g. bookstores in Kashmir) and publishing texts over generations. Now it requires quick pollution of datasets and model weights—a very much more concentrated and therefore vulnerable process without modern integrity breach countermeasures.

The question is not whether technology can make preservation more private, but whether we will manage integrity with wisdom or allow data to be subjected to ignorance, controlled by those who can drive the technology but not look in the rear view mirror let alone see the curve in the road ahead.

What persists is what we preserve either by purpose or neglect. Oral and written traditions are ancient in how they thought about what matters and who decides. The latest technology merely changes mechanisms of preservation.

When you steal someone’s authority through digital resurrection, you’re conducting what amounts to posthumous identity theft for influence operations. The victim can’t defend themselves, the audience lacks technical means to verify authenticity, and the attack surface includes every piece of digital communication the deceased ever generated.

Anyone who claims to really care about this issue should visit Grant’s Tomb, which is taller and more imposing that the Statue of Liberty. Standing there they should answer why the best President and General in American history has been completely obscured and denigrated by unmaintained trees, on an island obstructed by roads lacking crosswalks.

Preservation indeed.

Here lies the man who preserved the Union and destroyed slavery both on the battlefield and in the ballot box, yet his monument is literally obscured by neglect and poor urban planning. If Americans can’t properly maintain physical memorials to our most consequential leaders, what legal rights do we really claim for managing digital remains with wisdom?

General Grant said of West Point graduates trained on Napoleon’s tactics, who were losing the war, that he would respect them more if they were actually fighting Napoleon. Grant was a thinker 100 years ahead of his time and understood that wicked problems require new and novel methods, not just expanded execution of precedents.