UK Government Destroys 'Guardian' Hard Drives Over Snowden Story

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By Chris Taylor2013-08-19 16:26:15 -0700

British government officials ordered the destruction of hard drives at the Guardian offices in London that purportedly contained information relating to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed Monday.

They took the action even though Rusbridger, above, explained it was pointless. All the Guardian's NSA reporting is reported, stored and edited in New York, he told them. Not only that, but journalist Glenn Greenwald, the lead reporter on the story, lives in Brazil.

See also: 'The Guardian' Calls for Citizen Journalists Via App

The officials from GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of the NSA, were apparently unaware of the concept of information in the cloud — and seemed satisfied that they had been able to destroy something tangible. "'We can call off the black helicopters,' joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro," Rusbridger wrote on the Guardian website.

Rusbridger, who has edited the broadsheet newspaper since 1995, has been involved in a number of cases involving press freedom and sensitive materials. One of the more prominent was the Wikileaks scoop, for which the editor is portrayed by Peter Capaldi in the upcoming movie The Fifth Estate .

Still, Rusbridger called the hard drive incident "one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history."

See also: New Snowden Documents Expose Thousands of NSA Privacy Violations

"It felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age," he wrote. "We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London."

The UK government was also under fire Monday for detaining Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow Airport for nine hours this weekend — under legislation ostensibly meant to combat terrorism.

Image: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images News

Topics: edward snowden, guardian, Media, US & World, World