Try to imagine a society in which use of a photo copy machine or text scanner requires checking one out from the archeology department of the nearest University or possibly even paying a sizable insurance fee to a Museum to use one of theirs, or finding some well equiped intelligence oficer tasked with spying on planets with tecnhnology from the "dark ages", yet the odd three century old law here and there still requires the odd report or document to be printed on paper, so printers and paper may be unusual but are still much more common than a copier.

Also, don't think of it as a measure for protecting secrets, just a simple "This will limit it's circulattion.", possibly , also attempting to avoid the electronic security system for whatever reason.

Okay, I'll bite. Just give me a moment to think up a decent contrary position.

Ah, I know. DW is not being lazy, he strikes me as a firm believer in the idea that in any bureaucracy people are always promoted to their highest level of incompetence. And now that the Solarian League has been described as being governed by bureaucracies he is stuck following formula for anything therein. Whereas for the Talbot Cluster and Mesa, we may be surprised.

To me it kind of makes sense as I imagine that in an electronic information dominated society paper might be used to keep reports limited in circulation.

We seem to be getting a lot of information flow. Who knew or guessed what at different levels. It seems to me that Zilwiki, Cachat, Harrington, and others who are good at a collecting and analyzing information are being set up for some limelight. And if you believe Sun-tzu the spy business is a major factor in any war, although perhaps not as exciting as James Bond and such might make it.