Comment by duckfang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duckfang | Hacker News Reader

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I'd confidently say it's harder.

In person documents:

     requires being at a single location in the world
     single copy
     in secured storage
     in a secured building
     filled with people who can shoot you legally

Online documents:

     Can be done from anywhere in the world
     infinite copies can be made easily
     1 hack can un-secure the data
     threatening to shoot a computer doesn't have the same impact

Its really a computer hacker versus traditional spycraft. Spycraft isn't impossible, but does require assistance and tech from nation-states, and is prone to a set of really bad negative eventualities if caught.

Right, but that's not the whole story. Some documents can be permanently offline and still do their job. The list of police informants might be an example. The officer controlling the information writes it down, but he also remembers it. No one else looks at it except, in rare situations like a police corruption investigation, that officer's commander, or an internal investigation unit.

Other documents, will need a whole process of retrieving information, copying it, adding info, sending it, checking it, sharing it with other people. Police officers' own personnel records might be an example. If you only store these on paper, informal access procedures might be developed. For example, the civilian secretary is used to certain people requesting copies of 6 or 7 files at a time, so they don't always keep track of what was asked for. Unofficial copies get made and kept in someone's desk drawer so they don't have to spend a morning going over to the main HQ. And so on.

Now you have the worst of both worlds - lax security, but also no hope of the traceability and fine-grained access control of an electronic system.

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