In the midst of the row about whether or not former prime minister Sergei Stanishev had misplaced secret State Agency for National Security (SANS) documents, Prosecutor-General Boris Velchev made some astonishing suggestions.

Velchev said that leaking secret reports to the media was "not normal", and suggested that important documents should no longer be available in hard-copy form, but instead on password-protected CDs. According to Velchev, this way a record could be kept of who had read the documents.

It may be understandable that someone in Velchev’s position would not subscribe to the vision that it is precisely the role of the media in a free society to uncover and publish secret documents when that serves the public interest. And we will take the fact that CDs are not writeable formats and can therefore not keep track of anything, let alone who entered what password, as a minor technical oversight.

But maybe Velchev should talk to several of his West European colleagues to hear some of the more embarrassing stories of lost USB memory sticks or laptops that had all the documents of entire cases on them, and which ended up in the hands of those under investigation.

It is not only the Bulgarian police that have a poor track record of keeping things where they belong, and not just documents. For decades, Dutch police has kept statistics on "administratively misplaced service weapons". It was a public secret where and when some of these weapons had been used.

It was only recently that a British politician found an innovative way of leaking documents; by being photographed holding them for all to read while getting out of a taxi.
So would digitally encrypted files on password-protected CDs keep these files from being misplaced? Of course not.

It will just become so much easier.

Anything that is digital can and will be copied, sooner or later. Where and how the file is stored is irrelevant.

If the file is encoded or otherwise protected, the speed with which the encoding will be cracked is almost exclusively a function of the incentive to access the data inside the encrypted file.

Just ask any official in the film or music industry.

For someone under investigation, the only thing better than having access to the actual dossiers of the investigation would be regular coffee-meetings with the Interior Minister.
But ever since Roumen Petkov was forced to leave office, this has become a different ballgame.