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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm misinterpreting this, those are paraphrases and not quotes. There's no feasible reason to believe a government official is overtly villainous or foolish enough to say something like "You've had your fun."

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Remember that the people executing these commands (civil servants) are probably well aware of just how absurd and futile they are, and likely to make that clear with dark humour. On the destruction of the hard drives:

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

This bleak humour is typical of British public servants, and not at all unlikely, e.g. on leaving office after 10 years, a treasury secretary for the Labour government left a note for his successor:

'I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left.'

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/17/liam-byrne-n...

These off-hand comments don't materially change the story any in my view - the important points are that the government insisted on shutting down reporting as much as possible, and destroying any materials in the newspaper's possession.

They visited a newspaper office to destroy evidence - that's the important point here.

It does sound exactly like the type of goading comment a government official would make to a journalist off the record.

All of this controversy aside, do you have any real reference point for what a conversation between a government official and a journalist sounds like, let alone a goading one at that?

Yes; take what happens at the local politics level, and amplify it up several orders of magnitude.

What a reporter puts in quotation marks is being represented as a direct quote. What's written out in the context of a sentence is a paraphrase or summary.

I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back."

Would be a direct quote.

The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it.

Would be a paraphrase.

Are you done spreading FUD yet?

I'm not quite sure the editor of one of the most important newspapers of record right now is into "paraphrasing"

There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on.

That is, by definition, paraphrasing the meeting. I'm not accusing Rusbridger of mischaracterizing the interaction, I'm clarifying that this is probably isn't a direct quote. Note that this is an op/ed.

I'm pretty sure it is a direct quote. He didn't say, 'he said something to the effect of' or something else. He just quoted the official directly, and in the same vein as what the previous commenter pointed out, you wouldn't expect the editor of one of most important newspapers in the world to not know how to use quotes.

That is, by definition, describing the meeting. Paraphrasing is when you say in other words, generally shorter ones, what somebody else said.

What's your evidence that it's not a direct quote? Aside, of course, from your personal disbelief that a government official would say something ridiculous.

Double quotes imply a direct quote, not paraphrasing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark.

Not sure about villanous, but I have yet to see an action for which government employee would be not foolish enough to do it. There was time, long ago, where I would say "this is too foolish, no government employee would ever do such thing" - and I was proven wrong so many times that I gave up and never would say such thing again. For example: can you imagine senior government employee would be so foolish as to blatantly lie to Congress while testifying, and knowing there are many people that know it is a lie? Yet it happened in the last year not once, but multiple time with multiple people. And, surprisingly enough, nothing happened. So maybe it's not them that they are foolish - maybe it's us that are foolish enough to tolerate them.

While twirling his nefarious mustache, no doubt.

EDIT: If you must downvote me, go ahead, but I'm not making a statement here. I'm joking. I think HN could use it these days.

I can well imagine that the quote is accurate, although it would have been said with a certain sense of dark humour and sympathy, not at all as unkindly and aggressive as it appears in print. As such, it fits in very well with the culture of the armed forces - particularly that of a senior NCO who has gone on to work for the Security Services. (And who is used to being given bonkers orders by his C.O.)

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