Espionage is not new to the digital age. Stalin and the Soviets didn't need to do much of the research and development for the H-Bomb because they got the plans from the Americans. Ink and paper, and physical security didn't stop loss of the physics and engineering work.
(With the Great Patriotic War, WW1, Napoleon, etc. we can understand how the Russians didn't trust the US with the atomic bomb. And, they had many sympathetic US citizens to recruit from.)
When espionage was done in person, the awesome scale of digital age theft wasn't possible. They could take many pictures with a micro-camera when they were in the same room as the originals, but they couldn't take 50M pictures, or exfiltrate thousands of sheets of paper.
Agreed, the people and organizations who steal data have benefited greatly from the opportunity and scale of porous and insecure systems. But, truly valuable paper or air-gaped data is vulnerable to old-school methods.
The authors of the paper didn't mention once the subject of cryptography/cryptanalysis.
I'm amazed that any of the modern digital hardware or software works at all. The founding fathers of programming languages, networks, and operating systems paid no attention to security. Licklider at Bolt, Beranek and Newman or Jon Postel did amazing work just to make it function. Security is hard, and none of the original technology was designed with it in mind.
The authors of the article could have spend more words documenting the scale at which the technology has turned into a surveillance state. The massive scale of data that companies keep indefinitely - I don't know what to say about it. The US Government couldn't even keep control of the security clearance data for their military and spies. Whoever has the OPM data has the names, pictures, fingerprints, and family information of all/most of the members in the US military and three-letter-agencies. (Maybe that data should have been paper-only.)
Apple would have been a good example for the authors, also. They do a great job. Vulnerabilities are quickly fixed. The price Zerodium pays for iOS exploits is high. And, get a copy of what they know about you: "https://privacy.apple.com/account" . Listen to one person's thoughts about what this privacy-conscience company keeps about us: "https://inteltechniques.com/blog/2019/03/01/the-privacy-security-osint-show-episode-113/"
My final thoughts about the article are these: Companies and governments should collect only the necessary information to do their job, and truly delete it as soon as the need is over. Agreed, that's a simplistic statement. But for a forecast of the future if we don't, look to Stasi Colonal Wolfgang Schmidt's words: “It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used. This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”
