NSA files: why the Guardian in London destroyed hard drives of leaked files | Hacker News Reader

NSA files: why the Guardian in London destroyed hard drives of leaked files

theguardian.com

43 pointssinak17 comments

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.

The gentleman(?) who uttered that off hand and sarcastic remark has earned himself a footnote in history. I imagine he will be having 'words of advice'[1] soon from a senior officer.

[1] http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2013080119551...

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!"

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/20... 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?

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.

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...

Does insurance cover that, or does it come under "act of God"?

Even the article describes the act as "symbolic": the whole decision on how to "comply" with GCHQ's instructions was made by the Guardian and their response is broadly analogous to paying a hotly-contested fine with sacks full of coins.

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.

It is an intimidation tactic. Publish material the government wanted to keep secret, have your equipment destroyed. The cover story was about the security of information or some nonsense, but that is just meant to make things look and sound legal to the casual observer.

Their only goal was to show the Guardian that they are only as free as the Government wants them to be. They know they can't put the Snowden genie back in the bottle, but they can certainly scare the next Snowden into shutting up before he goes public. Once you accept that we (the U.S. or the U.K.) no longer live in a free society (from the Gov't's perspective) all of their actions make complete sense.

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.

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.

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

A more serious retrospective from someone who was there:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3561321/John...

Thank you. The second link is a wonderful read.

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.

My guess is that GCHQ was doing this to cover their asses, knowing that they would be blamed if the data were to be stolen from the Guardian by a foreign government. They don't care if the same thing happens in Brazil or elsewhere, since they're not responsible for it.

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