"Eventually" Aybell continued, "it was realized that the only way to
prevent hackers from destroying information
was to make it redundant; which is to have many copies in many
different places. Then these copies could be
polled to reconstruct the original if it were destroyed. But having
many copies made it so much more difficult to
keep anything secret that it was found to be easier in the long run to
eliminate secrecy. That foiled the hackers
because doing something like tracking down all the open copies of a
file and changing them in precisely the same
way is too tedious to be 'fun'. The hackers ignore open files, but a
file that couldn't be read would attract hackers
to read it like a rotting corpse attracts flies."
-- "One possible version of a post-technological society is described
in the second half of the novel Jesus in the Wilderness
which can be found at i.am/jesus.novel"
http://www.escalix.com/freepage/karlek/c21p13.html