In a similar vein, in some countries they just went back to paper voting after trying electronic machines (e.g. Netherlands). It's not perfect, but it electronic solution also doesn't seem to be, and overall it seems to work well enough.

There's this perception that "digital = better", but that's not always how it works. Actually, in quite a few cases the analogue solution was quite a bit better (analogue buttons, for example, but also just having some things on paper was a lot easier IMHO, like bus tickets and whatnot).

Completely understand where you are both coming from with ideas about security and "good enough" technique. But these were incredibly simple tasks which any simple automated system would suffice. Things that could be analyzed with a graph and 5 minutes of time to review it were taking days.

I also should have specified this was in an e-commerce company, so no state secrets or anything like that.

>> simple tasks which any simple automated system would suffice.

Show me a machine that can go from room to room, from vehicle to vehicle, counting rifles without error. In the dark. In the mud. When all the vehicles are parked in different places every day. Or another regular task at my unit: itemizing first aid kits. Good luck telling a robot to count the number of tourniquets in a locker without making a mess of things.

>>and "good enough" technique.

These aren't good enough things. The human being counting things and signing a piece of paper is better than the automated/online system. A human's positive control cannot be hacked remotely. Go to a hospital and see if the surgeons are ok with their tools being cleaned and counted by machines, without human backup. Will never happen.

Presumably Chuksta is referring to their original comments about the Japanese data center, not your experience in the military.

Other response to this was correct in their assumption. Those comments were additional to my initial. I was agreeing with you there is still a perfectly good time and place for this to occur, this was not one of those. Nice, safe, clean DC, with plenty of light, we're talking "how much space is left on the system drive?"

But humans can be bribed or blackmailed.

To be fair, Classified systems are an odd man out and all our other systems have been transitioning to electronic tracking, even most of our high side stuff have digital tracking inside of high side or without Classified information.

So can we defund the NSA then? If their conclusion is “lol just don’t use computers for anything important” why pay them hundreds of billions of dollars to “secure” them?

NSA's encryption trickery means little when the "secured" system isn't actually turned on. You still need to count things even when they are not in use, especially when they are in long term storage.