Can a typewriter really enhance the protection of information?

WITH Julian Assange avoiding arrest in an embassy and Edward Snowden avoiding arrest in an airport, both in trouble for effecting voluminous leaks of secret data, the Russian security guys have decided it’s time to go back to the future.

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?”