Vanish: Enhancing the Privacy of the Web with Self-Destructing Data
http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/

Program that makes email self destruct

ehind Vanish in detail. Briefly, as mentioned above, the user never knows the encryption key. This means that there is no risk of the user exposing that key at some point in the future, perhaps through coercion, court order, or compromise. So what do we do with the key? We could escrow it with a third party, but that raises serious trust issues (e.g., the case with Hushmail).

copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.

Storing the decryption key across many p2p nodes means you can "lose" the key at a specified time. As long as one of the p2p nodes you have used destroys the key, we can no longer decrypt the message. The theory is certainly sound, lets hope the implementation is.

Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.

How to disappear completely...

Is it possible to disappear when the entire internet is looking for you? One guy finds out.

Ratliff goes off the radar to see if he can live without being found in the modern age. After 28 days, someone did. See how it happened and what can be learned from it.