I recently encountered a sentence in an article I was editing that stopped me in my editing tracks by its multi-dimensional profundity:
The best form of security for a computer file is for the file to have never existed on the computer.
Before I could move ahead, I needed to call up a couple of my friends to see if they could unlock the mystery of that text.
Drago Kovic is a philosophy professor at Georgetown whose most popular class is on the roots of existentialism. Florian Stocchi is a consultant to DoD on matters of cyber warfare. The following is the gist of what they had to say.
DRAGO: The phrase "never existed on the computer" implies that the file existed elsewhere. But if it's a "computer file," where can it exist other than on a computer?
FLORIAN: If the concern is the security of files on a computer, but this file existed somewhere off of the computer, then why would it need any security at all?
DRAGO: And if it doesn't need any security because it exists somewhere other than on the computer, in essence and for purposes of this analysis, it is nonexistent.
FLORIAN: I concur. In that case, there is no need to even consider its security.
As I expected, Drago and Florian pointed me in the only direction possible. I deleted the sentence from the article.
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The Unbearable Rightness of Editing
