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

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.