Abstract. The black hole information loss paradox has plagued physicists since
Hawking's discovery that black holes evaporate thermally in contradiction to
the unitarity expected by quantum mechanics. I will explain just what the problem is,
and show that one of the central presumptions of the debate is incorrect.
It had been thought that (obviously) either all the information must remain in the black
hole until it has completely evaportate OR it must leak out earlier.  However, using
recent results in quantum information theory, we argue there is a third possibility:
 the amount of information that must remain in the black hole until the final stages of
evaporation can be very small, even though the amount already radiated away is negligible.
Quantum effects mean that information need not be additive: a small number of quanta can
"lock" a large amount of information, making it inaccessible. When this small number of
locking quanta are finally emitted, the full information (and unitarity) is restored.
Only if the number of initial states is restricted will the locking mechanism leak out
information early.

Short biography:

John A. Smolin received his S.B. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in 1989, and his Ph.D., also in physics, from the University of California at Los Angeles
in 1996.  After receiving his doctorate, he has been at IBM Research as a post-doc and later
a member of the research staff ever since.

Dr. Smolin and Charles H. Bennett built the first quantum cryptography apparatus at IBM in 1989. 
Dr. Smolin's current research interests are in quantum information thoery and quantum computation,
with the occasional misguided foray into the foundations of quantum mechanics.