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UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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If I care about data never being altered without permission then paper wins over digital, no contest. Paper is not immune to forgery but you can't automate breaking into millions of physical buildings to target certain individuals or mass destroy the documents.
That is why countries using electronic voting machines over paper should be considered an act of the poor, ignorance or corruption.
"Hanging chads" on paper ballots helped Bush swing/steal the election from Gore. Paper ballots have a lot of problems too. At least in California every vote on an electronic voting machine generates a paper ballot.
Paper systems have problems and years of experience solving them. Multiple parties with different interests watch to verify the input and counting process. Electronic is not watchable, tye result is unverifable - it's not fit for purpose.
A government curated paper copy is hardly any more impervious to tampering than a digital copy.
If a government were so inclined, they could produce a paper resembling the original easily, just as they could a digital copy.
Now you could make an argument for digital records to require an air gapped archive as well, if you fear a fully online copy could be compromised by a non government or foreign government entity, but that's not paper v. Digital, that's online versus offline storage.
Note I was recently dealing with the estate of someone who died, and we had what we thought was the most canonical hard copy of the will, but the court rejected it as a duplicate and said the will was invalid unless we found a true original. Fortunately the will was within what we could legally do without the will (but with more work), but suffice to say a government digital record of the will would have worked better than any hard copy that we actually had.
I don't know anything about tamping paper documents, only that it's difficult in an election when everyone is watching and that we can't watch computer bits.
Offline is certainly more secure than online but software is almost guaranteed to have bugs. An attack is potentially as simple as plugging in an USB stick into the right device anywhere in the chain of creating, storing and fetching the data to view the contents.
The convenience of a digital will may be overall more worthwhile than any security advantages paper has. I fear governments may require users to submit the will using their own proprietary 'black-box' software.