Can a typewriter really enhance the protection of information?
If two blokes with a little whistleblower assistance can blow a hole the size of a small country in the security systems of one of the largest and most power countries, it’s clearly time to take a new look at why it’s so easy to get information out of the computers where it should be and into media where — as they see it — it shouldn’t be.
The Russians are investing about €12,000 in typewriters. Yes, typewriters. They say that any malicious guy with smarts can download enormous amounts of information from a computer onto a flashdrive, whereas if one human being types a crucial document using a type-writer, then if somebody wants to steal and leak that data, they have to photocopy it, which is logistically complicated and time-consuming, or sit with the document and input their own version of it, which is both of the above and also, when it comes to publishing the material, raises the inevitable question “How can we know that you didn’t sit down with your PC on an insomniac night and just make up all this stuff?”
So it’s back to the typewriter, the technology that arguably changed more lives than any previously invented communications machinery. The typewriter was at least as effective, when it came to liberating women from their roles as powerless chattels of their menfolk, as were the more publicised actions of the Suffragettes. Women’s hands seemed suited to keyboards and their brains copped on to the QWERTY layout of those keyboards more easily than did the male brain at the time.
So many of them started to work outside the home and establish their own personal revenue streams that one historian suggests that a leap in the numbers of rapes was a direct consequence. Men were deeply threatened by this new female freedom and personal assertion the theory goes, and took to raping women as a violent demonstration of their power.
I’d put learning to type up there with learning to read and to drive a car as keys to freedom, although my mother, who saw the first two as essential, was ambivalent about typing lessons. She saw typing as a kind of gateway skill the way some people see marijuana as a gateway drug leading on to much worse. Once men knew you could type, she believed, they would turn you into a secretary, than which nothing was worse. After a brief but determined campaign on my side, though, my mother came around to the idea of typing lessons.
“Anyway, they’d only have to look at you to realise you’d be a terrible secretary,” she said, meaning that overweight slobs with laddered tights were not in great demand in that role. You know the concept of reverse snobbery? My mother had a variant all her own: reverse reinforcement. You ended up aiming higher than you wanted for fear that you weren’t acceptable at a lower level.
So off I went to a typing school reached by half a million narrow unvarnished stairs, and was planted in front of a machine that looked like the back end of an old Volvo. All of its keys were nail-varnished over, so students wouldn’t have the temptation to glance down. We were instructed to get our fingers on the red-varnished keys and return them to those “home” keys at all times. Then we watched a big screen at the top of the room and listened to bellowed instructions: “Aitch, NOW. O NOW. B Now.”
I WENT home after the first lesson with my hands hanging like dead bananas: swollen and useless. That, my mother told me, was because I’d been doing nothing with them since I’d abandoned piano lessons when Sr Fidelma smacked me on the knuckles with a ruler once too often.
As the week went on, my fingers got stronger and I was able to pound the keys with as much authority as anybody, even if my two little fingers refused to be fully committed team players. After a few weeks, I could do 60 words a minute, my fingers delivering words without thought.
It was even easier after the lessons finished and I invested in a portable typewriter, because its keys were easier to depress than those of the Volvo behemoth in the class. It was a rebirth. My appalling handwriting was now irrelevant. I could send a perfectly respectable document to anybody. I could deliver beautifully clean copy to the newspaper for which I worked at the time, where it would be typed out all over again by a typesetter, a pointless duplication of effort nobody thought twice about, back then.
I also spent several years sniffing Tipp-Ex, before someone told me I was wrecking my liver, not to mention my appearance. (Because my aim wasn’t the best, I tended to have a semi-permanent daub of dried Tipp-ex on the end of my nose.) The only setback happened one day when I was in the boss’s office and a sub-editor named John Spain wandered in, asking of the group present if anybody knew if Terry Prone’s copy had been filed.
“I have it here,” I said.
He fixed me with a gaze of astonishingly concentrated venom.
“Oh, you’re the one,” he said bitterly. “The one who types the last line on her page up and down. Like a Toblerone.”
I defended myself by saying I’d been told never to carry a sentence from one page to another, so when enthusiasm landed me unexpectedly at the end of the page I had to hold the paper while I typed the last line. With the inevitable Toblerone effect. Through gritted teeth, he suggested that a tiny pencilled X in the margin two inches from the bottom would prevent this from happening.
“You also have a prolapsed J,” he added, unmollified by my promise to get busy with pencils. I thought that was kind of personal, although he was right — and that’s another reason typewriters are wonderful for security reasons. Even if your machine didn’t develop a sinking letter as mine did, each one ages in a unique way, and so many a crime has been solved, thanks to the individuality of the typewriter involved.
Of course when electric machines arrived, as a card-carrying early adopter, I bought one. A couple of years later, I owned the first electronic word processor in Ireland. It was the size of a suitcase. These days, I’m up to my armpits in smartphones, laptops so tiny they’d work in Lilliput. But the minute I heard that the Kremlin was re-introducing the trusty typewriter, I came over all nostalgic. The comforting noise of a typewriter with that bell noise announcing the completion of each line. The physicality of the paper. The fact that you could pause without it deciding to save power by going to sleep.
Bring it back more generally, say I. It’s slow cooking for words.
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