Serious question.
— Official Puzzle In A Thunderstorm Podcast Account (@PiatPod) January 25, 2023
Why aren’t classified documents viewed ONLY on digital format and password secured? You could make the password expire in 24 hours.
This would solve the problem of taking them home.
Serious question
Scottie's Playtime 
Because, believe it or not, paper remains a highly secure medium when handled properly; electronic records are endlessly mutable, even if ‘password protected’. It ain’t like Hollywood.
If you copy a document on any modern copier there are invisible watermarks included to identify the very copier, date and time that the copy was made, which is how Reality Winner was caught because Glenn Greenwald is an idiot and did not know this.
There are millions of classified documents more or less in circulation among the billions of documents the US government generates, and the vast, VAST majority are handled properly. Between Pence and Biden there were at most a few dozen documents found, in Biden’s case stretching back decades to his time in the Senate. I’d wager this was more of an issue of over-classification than a deliberate attempt to avoid proper records handling. We also don’t know what kind of ‘Classified’ any of these documents were. We DO know this in Trump’s case, and many were of the highest level of classification, documents that were not suposed to leave a SCIF.
Trump deliberately stole hundreds or thousands of documents while covering his theft under the deliberately caused chaos of his “transition” and exit from the White House; given that I deeply suspect he doesn’t read ANYTHING on a computer screen, electronic only copies would not have prevented what he did. He would have them printed out.
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You make some good points. Seems to me there are pros and cons on both sides.
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Part of it is because managing electronic documents securely is part of my day job as an IT administrator. It forces me to be far more aware of the weaknesses inherent in all of our information technology, as compared to the ‘old days’ of paper records, where we have hundreds of years experience in managing and refining secure management of them.
We have less than a century experience in managing electronic records while the entire technology has changed and grown at (literally) an exponential rate. The myriad ways any computerized system can be compromised can make your hair stand on end.
The only truly secure computer system is one that is not connected to any network, is in a locked room, and is accesible by only one person.
…and is turned off. 🙂
One of my favorite xkcd comics kind of illustrates this:
https://xkcd.com/2030
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