But what if they still find some way into the trunk?

In fact, your grandson does find a way to remove the wooden bottom, look through its contents, replace them, and reseal the trunk without you even knowing.

Luckily, you anticipated this possibility. When he breached the trunk, he was able to lay hands on your will in its envelop marked “Last Will and Testament.” But the trunk included 30 different envelopes that all said “Last Will and Testament.” Each held a list with very different bequeathals. Your grandson had no way of knowing which was the real will, though he held it in his hands. Only your lawyer knew which one was real.

Hiding something is one way to keep it secure. Overwhelming would-be snoops with plausible decoys is another way. Yet virtually no one’s email inbox is deliberately seeded with fake messages so that prying eyes cannot entirely know what is real.

Imagine a startup called Plausible Deniability LLC.

When I first conceived it years ago, I thought that the firm would be given access to the Google accounts of its customers, for the purpose of obscuring search histories. Over time, at random moments, it would perform searches generally regarded as embarrassing. “Donald Trump sex tape.” “Signs you have an Oedipus complex.” “Herbal cures for chlamydia, gluten free.” “What is Aleppo?” “Why is my credit score so low?” “Does huffing cat litter cause erectile dysfunction?”

The company would not store any data on the searches that it performed, only that a given person was a customer and therefore not necessarily responsible for a search.

I used to think Plausible Deniability could start off marketing itself to Stanford strivers who didn’t want to be blackmailed by a hacker during their 2032 Senate run. “My fellow Californians, I never searched for ‘molly delivery.’ Like some of you, I’m a customer of Plausible Deniability to protect my privacy from snoops.” But I didn’t want would-be politicians helped so much as the person who hesitates before conducting a search like “suicide helpline” or “free anonymous HIV testing.”

Success would’ve depended in part on whether Plausible Deniability became common knowledge. After all, some would be put off by the danger of signing up for a service that generates fake searches. What if everyone later believed that a fake was real? The concept would only work if lots of people came to know about the tactic, and it was used by lots of people, not just outliers trying to hide a terrible secret.

In fact, that hurdle, along with the fact that profitability would spawn instant competitors, meant that the only likely path to a new norm of plausible deniability would’ve been a company like Google or Yahoo offering such a service free to its users. Had the idea expanded to email, John Podesta’s account would’ve included “sent emails” that he never actually sent, alongside the actual emails that make him and some of his correspondents look bad. (Would fake messages appear only in sent mail, or would contacts occasionally get messages that they’re texted to disregard or that bypass their inbox but live in their archives?) If the fakes had ranged from the wildly implausible, like a note about how Hillary Clinton was the true killer of JFK, all the way to the fake but totally plausible, like a note to George Soros complaining about Stephen Bannon, Podesta would’ve gained plausible deniability.