{"id":24065,"date":"2014-01-31T09:30:13","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T14:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24065"},"modified":"2014-01-31T09:30:13","modified_gmt":"2014-01-31T14:30:13","slug":"security-theatre-special-edition-destroying-hard-drives-that-held-snowdens-documents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/01\/31\/security-theatre-special-edition-destroying-hard-drives-that-held-snowdens-documents\/","title":{"rendered":"Security theatre special edition – destroying hard drives that held Snowden’s documents"},"content":{"rendered":"

It may have been pointless — and it was! — but the British government not only felt it had to do something, but that it had to be seen<\/em> to be doing something<\/a>:<\/p>\n

New video footage has been released for the first time of the moment Guardian<\/em> editors destroyed computers used to store top-secret documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n

Under the watchful gaze of two technicians from the British government spy agency GCHQ, the journalists took angle-grinders and drills to the internal components, rendering them useless and the information on them obliterated.<\/p>\n

The bizarre episode in the basement of the Guardian<\/em>‘s London HQ was the climax of Downing Street’s fraught interactions with the Guardian<\/em> in the wake of Snowden’s leak — the biggest in the history of western intelligence. The details are revealed in a new book — The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man<\/em> — by the Guardian<\/em> correspondent Luke Harding. The book, published next week, describes how the Guardian<\/em> took the decision to destroy its own Macbooks after the government explicitly threatened the paper with an injunction.<\/p>\n

In two tense meetings last June and July the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the Guardian<\/em>‘s editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.<\/p>\n

Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American’s National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: “We can do this nicely or we can go to law”. He added: “A lot of people in government think you should be closed down.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It may have been pointless — and it was! — but the British government not only felt it had to do something, but that it had to be seen to be doing something: New video footage has been released for the first time of the moment Guardian editors destroyed computers used to store top-secret documents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,84],"tags":[459,109,925,224,895],"class_list":["post-24065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-government","tag-censorship","tag-computers","tag-edwardsnowden","tag-freedomofthepress","tag-gchq"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6g9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24065"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24066,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24065\/revisions\/24066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}