Watch the Brits Stupidly Force a Newspaper to Destroy Computers Because of Snowden

There have been a number of low
points in the tone-deaf responses from government officials in the
wake of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing. It’s hard to pick the
worst – though the failure to fire Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper for lying to the Senate and anonymous
intelligence officials expressing their desire to
murder Snowden would certainly be up there (down there?).

Over in Britain, probably one of the stupidest responses to this
mass surveillance scandal so far happened last summer, when the
country’s spy agency went over to the offices of The
Guardian, the newspaper where journalist Glenn Greenwald first
broke the story, and ordered them to physically destroy computers
that were tainted – so to speak – with the documents Snowden
leaked.

That Greenwald was not in England and the destruction of the
computers would not stop the flow of Snowden’s data didn’t seem to
matter. Today The Guardian released video showing the
destruction of the computers, along with more details about the
newspapers’ interactions with the government, which was threating
to
shut them down:

The government’s response to the leak was initially slow – then
increasingly strident. [Guardian Editor Alan] Rusbridger told
government officials that destruction of the Snowden files would
not stop the flow of intelligence-related stories since the
documents existed in several jurisdictions. He explained that Glenn
Greenwald, the Guardian US columnist who met Snowden in Hong Kong,
had leaked material in Rio de Janeiro. There were further copies in
America, he said.

Days later Oliver Robbins, the prime minister’s deputy national
security adviser, renewed the threat of legal action. “If you won’t
return it [the Snowden material] we will have to talk to ‘other
people’ this evening.” Asked if Downing Street really intended to
close down the Guardian if it did not comply, Robbins confirmed:
“I’m saying this.” He told the deputy editor, Paul Johnson, the
government wanted the material in order to conduct “forensics”.
This would establish how Snowden had carried out his leak,
strengthening the legal case against the Guardian’s source. It
would also reveal which reporters had examined which files.

With the threat of punitive legal action ever present, the only
way of protecting the Guardian’s team – and of carrying on
reporting from another jurisdiction – was for the paper to destroy
its own computers. GCHQ officials wanted to inspect the material
before destruction, carry out the operation themselves and take the
remnants away. The Guardian refused.

You can watch the video
here. As is obvious by now (and was obvious to everybody at the
time) the destruction did not stop the flow of information from
Snowden to the public.