

NSA files: why the Guardian in London destroyed hard drives of leaked files - sinak
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london

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Lagged2Death
_You 've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back..._

What a bunch of goons. The files we've heard about have all been NSA's stuff,
not GCHQ's, so even if the wacky, anachronistic idea of "giving back" a
digital file were coherent, the complete demand still wouldn't be.

~~~
hvs
It's not about _logic_ , it's about _power_. They didn't walk away saying,
"Well, we took care of those files!" they walked away saying, "Maybe the
Guardian will think twice the next time they cross us!"

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themoogle
[http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-
images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/20...](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-
images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/8/20/1377020151375/5f534bc9-1b28-4da1-8091-515b95274d52-460x276.jpeg)
Why the hell did they destroy a video card? and what looks like the board from
a printer or projector? Are they really that stupid?

~~~
ealexhudson
Looks like laptop bits to me as well; I imagine the thinking is that they must
ensure the data is definitely gone - it looks to me like they destroyed every
ASIC on every component. I don't think it's stupidity; after all, you can't
just expect Mr Bond to die.

~~~
themoogle
I identified what the other green board is... It is a controller board for a
lcd....HDMI VGA power connectors on left side... Why destroy something that
doesn't hold any data... "The intelligence men stood over Johnson and Blishen
as they went to work on the hard drives and memory chips with angle grinders
and drills, pointing out the critical points on circuit boards to attack. "
These GCHQ officials must have had no clue how a computer works... were really
really freaking stupid... or there is something hidden in all lcds and video
cards we don't know and the GCHQ does know...

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ealexhudson
It would be interesting to know why the UK Govt. felt the need to do this.
GCHQ would have known better than anyone that alternative copies of the data
are available, and although the security argument does make a small amount of
sense (it wouldn't be unheard of for a third-party state actor to go after
this data, and it was mentioned previously that some of it would not/should
not be released) it doesn't seem to be a very compelling argument.

If there was going to be a concerted effort involving the US and Brazil to
shut down the source legally, that would be one thing, but that seems an
unlikely eventuality and it would have made more sense to do it in a co-
ordinated fashion if that was the goal.

Instead, they seem to achieved little more than pissing off the various people
involved. That seems too a high-risk strategy to be deliberate (serious tin-
foil hat territory). I also think these people are smart, smart enough that
there must be some justifiable reason.

This situation definitely does demonstrate what a poor location for journalism
London truly is. We have some great journalism, and I'm ever-more baffled as
to how that result has come about given libel / official secrets / lack of
speech protection / etc. etc.

~~~
redthrowaway
I actually disagree with those who say this was a pure intimidation tactic, or
that it was the GCHQ honestly trying to prevent the material from being
published. Rather, I think Hanlon's Razor is relevant here:

 _Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity._

The GCHQ is a large, cumbersome, government bureaucracy. I have no faith that
they are any more or less competent than any other large, cumbersome,
government bureaucracy.

This is exactly the kind of decision made by a committee of ass-covering
middle managers: it has the superficial quality of being an attempt to achieve
the stated goal (recover or destroy the documents), and it absolves them of
personal responsibility for failure (those pesky journalists are operating
outside our jurisdiction).

Nobody gets fired for buying IBM, and nobody loses their job over a ham-fisted
attempt to meet the technical requirements passed down from on high.

~~~
betterunix
Maybe so, but then why take so long to get around to this? GCHQ knew that the
Guardian had these files all summer long. If this were a cover-your-ass move
would they not have done this back in May or June?

It could be that GCHQ is so bureaucratic that they need three months to figure
out what to do with an information leak. On the other hand, the UK government
did just intimidate Greenwald's partner for no apparent reason. This sounds
more like retaliation at this point; the only bureaucratic inefficiency to it
is the amount of time it took for the government to decide to retaliate.

~~~
redthrowaway
The British spy agencies have always had a well-earned reputation for
surprising incompetence.[1] It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if it
took them three months to make a decision and it ended up being an idiotic
one.

[1] An entertaining read:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER)

A more serious retrospective from someone who was there:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3561321/John...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3561321/John-
le-Carre-the-spies-who-lost-it.html)

~~~
lttlrck
Thank you. The second link is a wonderful read.

~~~
redthrowaway
It's strange, I've never been able to get into le Carre's novels, but I do
quite enjoy his writing in that piece.

