Screw Your Electronic Dodads

Tubes delivered documents from the floor of a typewriter factory in England in 1954.
Walter Nurnberg / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

No, it's not the German Chancellory, but it is the coolest picture I could find of a pneumatic tube system.

From a report on RT: 

Berlin’s concerns over possible espionage have led to distrust in more modern message delivery techniques, a report has claimed

German leader Olaf Scholz has shelved plans to phase out a 19th century-era pneumatic tube system that is being used in Berlin’s chancellery to distribute about 1,000 documents per month amid fears that more modern electronic systems may pose an espionage risk, a report by Der Spiegel has claimed.

For decades, Germany’s government headquarters has relied upon the archaic system, which uses compressed air to send capsules containing documents between 36 stations inside the building. The network costs just $16,000 to operate annually – far less than some other more sophisticated electronic message delivery methods.

The documents are often “generally urgent transactions that cannot be forwarded electronically or via house courier service, for example, because they are subject to secrecy or have to be signed in the original,” a government spokesman said, according to Der Spiegel on Thursday.

The network of tubes was intended to be phased out by 2025. Still, according to a report by the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, Scholz has put those plans on hold – with the newspaper citing concerns over an alleged increase in Russian espionage attempts since the onset of the conflict in Ukraine in February 2022 as the primary reason.

Time to trot out the old saw about houses and locks. When people first started using computers nobody was worried about the security of the data because nobody else had a computer that could process it. As more people got computers they discovered that these things could be handy, kind of like when people first started building houses. They weren't worried about someone breaking in because there weren't any locks. But then somebody realized that there weren't any locks and started walking in and stealing stuff. So people started putting locks on their doors and we've been doing it ever since. Computers are still trying to figure out what locks work and what locks don't, The guys who are good at figuring out how to make locks for computers are the same guys who are good at figuring how to break those locks, so it's probably going to be a while before we have a system we can agree on. Given the nature of computers it may not even be possible to build a really secure system. And given the rampant corruption running around loose in the world, even a truley secure system can be compromised.