The US Department of State Staff has moved to work with handwritten statements for security reasons.

From E-QIP website

The Department of Public Affairs of the United States (Office of Personnel Management, OPM) temporarily closed the site for receiving applications from government officials and announced the transition to paper-based documents . The reason was the global restructuring of the entire electronic system for receiving E-QIP calls, caused by the hacker attack revealed in April 2015, as a result of which personal information about millions of public servants fell into the hands of third parties.

For the first time, a security breach of the E-QIP system was discovered in April 2015, and it was only announced in June. In this case, data leakage began to occur in March 2014, and according to some information - perhaps earlier. At first it was announced that 4 million civil servants had become victims of hacking. Then, on June 24, the FBI head, James Komi, reported that a total of 18 million government employees could have leaked from the system. After that, new details came to light, with the result that the total number of victims could reach 32 million .
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It was one of the largest data breaches in US history. It is not yet known exactly which data of which employees were compromised - the majority of employees have no idea whether their data is safe or not.

In an unknown direction, social security numbers, names, dates and places of birth, and residential addresses flowed away. There is reason to suspect leaks and additional information related to internal investigations into the credibility of employees (bad habits, sexual addictions , etc.). As one of the victims of the leak described the situation: “agency representatives interview your neighbors to find out what they know about you, in order to be able to use this information against you”. In addition, there was a leak of data related to the categories of access to classified information.

The US government hastily blamed the Russian and Chinese hackers for leaks, decided to transfer all the websites of government services to HTTPS by the end of next year, and seriously took care of the security of personal data of state employees. For this , the E-QIP document management system was closed for renewal for a period of four to six weeks.

But since it is somehow necessary to work at this time, all applications that usually passed through this system will be received in handwritten form during this period - that is, on paper. These are, in particular, documents related to internal investigations, applications for employment, etc. The application for employment alone contains about 120 printed pages . At least, through the Internet, such information is no longer stolen.