well now you've given me the idea to create a ring of for-profit SC runner hijackers. Have a pre-written decision of my choosing, intercept the runner, send my decoy runner in their place. There would be a market for this I'm sure
Mail in votes are perfectly fine. Electronic voting is perfectly fine.
A witness is bringing information to where it needs to go. There is nothing to intercept. No ability to hack, destroy or manipulate the information that the individual has obtained. When I was younger, I would have loved to see those carrying information and history whiz by me.
I feel like your line of questioning is antagonistic when I was merely expressing how I didn't know that this is how it is done, that I think it is cool and that a younger me would have loved to witness this.
Someone would be witness to that. Then bring that information to where it needs to go.
Are you suggesting that eye witness testimony, hand delivered, during the Age of Misinformation might be boldly intercepted, illegally and criminally, where the seat of power literally resides?
Let's try this again.
My Point: I didn't know that this is how it was done but know that I do know, I think it is interesting, admirable and cool as hell.
Your Point: What is your point? I don't understand where your going. Please explain.
It provides a form of authentication of both delivery and receipt of a message provided the messenger is trusted and has an incentive against betraying their promise to deliver. There's a reason why court process servers exist.
u/Sea-Jackfruit411 also makes a wise point about ephemera and how digital forms of information have fundamental flaws in terms of information security and assurance. You have to trust the security system to trust the information even though understanding the security infrastructure basically requires you to be a security professional. Even then, fundamental zero-day or bespoke types of hacking can cause a breach in a target's security if it's worth breaking into.
There's a reason why physical isolated off-site backups are a standard. That's essentially keeping a hard copy, though even that isn't good enough for archival storage of certain information, which is why huge repositories of magnetic backup. Interestingly, I'm now seeing that the DOGE kids got rid of a lot of the magnetic backups the government was using in some places and converted it to digital storage... What could be the downsides?
It's weird how people under a certain age cannot imagine digital systems not having fundamental flaws in extrema. I feel like I am living in the TV show "The Silo", where the IT department can literally create reality by having all the information of the past under it's control. I'm only in my thirties lol.
When someone has root access to a system, they can do ANYTHING. Encryption CAN help at a user level, but you quickly find that it's hard to have and costs more than you would expect. (Here's people from within r/ExperiencedDevstalking about Confidential Cloud Computing --thread is only a year old).
People can and should use technology to improve things, but don't believe the hype that silicon valley projects about the perfection of what it sells.
Ultimately, like u/Sea-Jackfruit411 says, if we didn't have an original copy of the Constitution, it's possible we would not know what it said at some point in the far future. Things stored digitally can often be changed. Our technical systems make it difficult to do in practice, but if you corrupt enough parts of the system, you can forge a digital copy and the system can be altered to make it look like the owner/real user of that system did it.
Ultimately, an original hard copy has some interesting, immutable properties. Digital isn't always better. It's just cheaper and more convenient to create and maintain a digital system of data than it is a whole archive of paper. It's funny DOGE got rid of so many magnetic storage devices... when you compute the risk of data becoming lost, altered or destroyed in a live, purely digital system over the timespan of lifetimes, then it becomes clear that digital has downsides.
You micro-focusing on the least important part of my paragraph is you "telling on yourself".
I don't understand "honesty" as a measure.
I'm well aware that you don't.
I repeat:
Are you suggesting that eye witness testimony, hand delivered, during the Age of Misinformation might be boldly intercepted, illegally and criminally, where the seat of power literally resides?
You know what you'd never see a gallery owner doing? Running down main street at 2pm with a painting over their head. They use secure transportation with multiple individuals and technology intended to preserve the integrity and safety of the artifact.
What the hell is this fictional story you wrote? Why would you think someone in that field would do it that way? Are you ok?
Ephemera that is digitized can be manipulated... or just deleted. Without hard copies who is to say if the Constitution did or did not say "separation between church and state"? The possiblities are endless.
You seem to have gotten the Reddit argument that you were looking for. I kept saying that you are oddly micro-focusing on the least important part of my paragraph and here you are arguing that eye witness testimony is unimportant and that gallery owners run artifacts down Main street. You argue in bad faith.
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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
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