As in Zero Dark Thirty and the hunt for Bin Laden, paper pushers are society's heroes

OSAMA BIN LADEN was killed by a piece of paper. That is the central message of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's film about the hunt for him.

Jessica Chastain

OSAMA BIN LADEN was killed by a piece of paper. That, it seems to me, is the central, unexpected and profoundly uplifting message of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's film about the hunt for him.

The key scene comes roughly two-thirds of the way through the film: for eight years, the CIA has been torturing suspects, following false trails and getting ambushed by al-Qa'ida. Then Debbie from the archives section pops up clutching an old file: digging through the records, she has found an overlooked clue to the identity of bin Laden's courier. The answer was in the files all along.

The rest is history. And so, soon after, is bin Laden. The Navy Seals administer the coup de grace, but Debbie from Archives is the real heroine and the moral of the story is a simple but important one: torture doesn't work but good paperwork does.

We detest paper-pushing bureaucrats, yet efficient filing and reliable record-keeping are bulwarks of justice: solid, old-fashioned paperwork does not just track down terrorists; it rights ancient wrongs, sets the record straight, regulates society, solves crimes and wins wars. Yet with digitisation, traditional paperwork is dying out. Debbie from Archives may soon be an anachronism.

Bureaucracy is supposed to regulate society, but contempt for bureaucracy is one of the ties that bind us in shared antipathy towards the form-filling, book-keeping, business-sapping, clerical impositions of modern society from the DVLA to HMRC, from passport applications to parking tickets. Behind the State's demand for the correct paperwork, weird, comical, and frequently infuriating, stands the bureaucrat, impersonal and unrelenting. Any attack on red tape is an instant vote-winner.

Yet bureaucracy, as a word and an idea, was forged by the French Revolution and conceived as a vital defence of liberty. Official paperwork, the Revolutionaries believed, would depersonalise power and cut through the networks of noble and royal privilege; with a proper record of state actions, citizens could demand a full accounting from their government.

The idea swiftly got out of hand, of course, as the Terror took hold, heads rolled and the paper mountain grew. "All relations between all public functionaries can no longer take place except in writing," the revolutionaries decreed, giving birth to what Ben Kafka, a historian of bureaucracy with a supremely apt name, calls a "new ethos of paperwork".

Anyone who has wrestled with an intractable, faceless bureaucracy should take heart from the heroism of Charles-Hippolyte Labussiere, the first bureaucratic counter-revolutionary.

Labussiere, an official on the Committee of Public Safety, discovered that the actors of the Comedie Francaise had been slated for execution. He removed their files, soaked them in the bath until they were reduced to an illegible paste, rolled them into tiny pellets and flicked them, in the manner known to every schoolboy, out of the window into the river. The actors were saved: no paper trail, no guillotine.

Paperwork can liberate as well as oppress; it can rationalise society as well as gum it up. Paperwork may be infuriating and wasteful, but is also essential, ensuring clean hospital beds and payment of the national debt. Alongside clerical errors and bureaucratic bungling are countless instances in which reliable record- keeping has underpinned justice.

The recent unearthing of a vast secret archive of colonial records will allow a fair accounting of Britain's imperial past. Yesterday The Times reported the discovery of three long-lost crates of evidence at the Serious Fraud Office that may finally shed light on the murky Asil Nadir case.

Red tape is entwined into our history. The term itself may originate in the 80 or more petitions sent by Henry VIII to Pope Clement, each bound with the official red ribbon of state, demanding the annulment of his marriage. The Church of England was thus founded on red tape.

In the Warsaw ghetto doomed Jewish scholars deliberately set out to compile, preserve and bequeath a detailed account of the suffering, knowing that an accurate record was the most powerful weapon against evil. Indeed, the German mania for record-keeping while implementing the Final Solution ensured a meticulous accounting for the worst crime in history.

Researching the Second World War, I am often awed by the power of Britain's wartime bureaucracy, the thousands of unsung desk warriors who filed, collated, managed and recorded the logistics of conflict with ruthless efficiency. The spy war was won, in large part, by the vastly superior filing systems of MI5 and MI6. We fought them on the beaches, in the fields and in the streets, but we also fought them, with extraordinary success, among the filing cabinets.

The Government has at last decided to award a medal to veterans of the Arctic convoys and a clasp to the survivors of Bomber Command. I propose a medal commemorating another unjustly neglected campaign: the Distinguished Filing Cross.

Paperwork is now under threat because paper itself is vanishing. We fill out more forms, more grumpily, than ever before - even the French Revolution never achieved the dense web of regulation we have today - but less permanently.

We assume that digital records are everlasting: Labussiere would have had a job mashing up government hard-drives and flicking them into the Seine. We imagine that pressing the "Save" key does exactly what it says.

In reality, electronic records, at once huge and intangible, are also remarkably fragile and evanescent. Each advance in technology creates fresh problems of preservation. CDs disintegrate after twenty years. Floppy disks were once ubiquitous; today, very few computers can read them. Only the most fastidious e-mailer preserves messages; texts must be archived somewhere in the ether, but not in a way that you or I can retrieve them.

The average lifespan of a website is about two months. In the wake of WikiLeaks, officials increasingly seek to damn the leakage at source by expunging and deleting, covering their tracks in the electronic archive.

In Zero Dark Thirty the discovery of the key file is a dramatic high point, but also an antique moment, as the camera zooms in on the paper folder. In CIA archives, like everywhere else, physical files have given way to digital ones.

In an age of ever more voluminous, ever more fragile records, Debbie from Archives has never been more essential.