If I had read in isolation a comment such as mine written by someone else then my reaction might have been the same—and I suspect many others would have reacted similarly. The trouble with my comment (of which I was aware when I wrote it) is that I provided little about the actual circumstance and nothing about the background of the matter, which, for obvious reasons, I still cannot do.

In choosing to reply to this story I had a choice of making my point about the often fragile and ephemeral nature of electronic data and I chose an actual real-world example that involved myself in preference to some hypothetical case which would have been less interesting. The fact was at the time email in this organization was both insecure and often ephemeral by nature in that there was no guarantee that copies of it would be kept indefinitely let alone able to be authenticated at some later date (unfortunately the reasons are too involved to explain here, you'll just have to my word for it).

That and the fact that decisions made by the CEO often turned out to be bad or made inappropriately and that he regularly changed his mind about matters that had already been signed off after being influenced by external voices and did so without consultation with his departmental heads caused serious disruption within the organization to the extent that it became almost dysfunctional—not to mention staff morale being reduced to an all-time low was the reason why I demanded he provide me with written instructions under his signature. That I was not fired both vindicated my stance and showed the true gravity of the situation. (I eventually left the organization of my own volition well after the event. Without doubt it was the worst working environment I've personally experienced).

Incidentally, my staff were always loyal to me, in fact I protected them from much of the turmoil. What I was surprised learned from that and other related incidents was who one's real friends were and or those who held strong ethics and who were prepared to stand up for them. I received support from the most unexpected of people—staff, managers etc. from very different departments to IT, many of whom I hardly knew.

I note you chose to focus on my insubordination rather than the matter of reliability, authentication, paper documents, etc. This is not a criticism given the abrupt way I presented my comment, in hindsight I could have worded it more tactfully but in hurried HN posts that doesn't always happen, as here (that said, I'm usually reasonably restrained and careful about what I post online). It was interesting to note that some voters almost immediately voted the comment down after posting but surprisingly the votes fluctuated either way and are now split evenly—in fact to the exact number.

That work incident wasn't supposed to hog the comment, it was only meant to be a stand-in for cases where it's turned out that physical evidence was either much harder to tamper with and or easier/cheaper to authenticate than electronic counterparts.

First I'll mention a personal case, some years ago I had a contractor with a nice important-sounding name do some work on a property where I was not living at the time, it was substandard and he never provided a proper itemized invoice (and after I forced him to provide paperwork it was obvious that many of the newly listed items were only padding). I disputed the bill and the matter went to court and I lost—in the end a bill of around $2,000 ended up costing me over $10,000. He claimed he sent me email which I never received and stated to the court that his computer later failed so he could never prove it. The judge took his word and not mine, so I lost. Had he said he faxed me the info then the situation would have been very different—the printed log sheet of my fax would have shown that he had not done so and it would have been verifiable as fax logs are notoriously difficult to forge well. (I know, in a much bigger case telco comms records etc. could be subpoenaed, but that's well outside the scope of a petty sessions case like mine where the Beak expects to get through a half dozen cases before lunch).

When working in surveillance and remote monitoring (this time with a decent, professional organization) we switched from film cameras to digital ones and then read them remotely (which we couldn't do with film and inconveniently it had to be collected by hand). To switch over we had to go to inordinate lengths to ensure the data link was tamper proof and the data was properly encrypted and authenticated. On the other hand, the physical film was almost impossible to tamper with without it being clearly evident (but again we didn't have the luxury of remote monitoring).

I've many more such instances but not the time to cite them here. Sure, digital data is taking over the world but physical data is extraordinarily difficult to forge well if subject to proper scrutiny/forensics. On the other hand, digital forensics can be both very expensive and often very difficult to detect and or difficult to detect and apprehend the culprits; if were not fact and it were easy to do then we wouldn't be saddled with the many billions of dollars internet fraud that we see every year.