The Guardian destroys NSA docs

[Le Socialiste]

British paper details confrontation with UK spies

LONDON (AP) — A British newspaper released new details of its confrontation with the country's intelligence service on Tuesday, saying it destroyed hard drives containing material leaked by Edward Snowden in order to insulate the former American intelligence worker from potential prosecution and to keep reporting on his leaks.

The Guardian said senior staffers shattered the electronics using angle grinders and drills in mid-July in a bid to avoid legal action or even a police raid that could halt its reporting or provide evidence for U.S. officials seeking to put Snowden behind bars.

"I didn't want to get in that position," editor Alan Rusbridger said in a video interview posted to the Guardian's website. "Once it was obvious that they would be going to law, I would rather destroy the copy than hand it back to them or allow the courts to freeze our reporting."

He said the paper has other copies of the same material located elsewhere.

Rusbridger spoke as disquiet continued to grow over the detention of Guardian journalist Glen Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, who was held for nine hours at London's Heathrow Airport on Sunday as he was ferrying material related to the Snowden story between filmmaker Laura Poitras in Germany and Brazil, where Greenwald is based.

Snowden's leaks have served as the jumping off point for a series of stories about America's globe-spanning surveillance program, including revelations that U.S. spies reach deep inside private companies to keep track of tens of millions of innocent Americans' phone and Internet conversations with limited independent oversight. The stories have emboldened privacy activists and embarrassed President Barack Obama, who recently unveiled a slate of intelligence reforms intended to calm public concerns.

Legal commentators have questioned the legality of Miranda's detention, which civil liberties groups have decried as an abuse of power aimed at sabotaging Greenwald's coverage.

The British government has declined to comment on the shattered hard drives, but it defended its decision to detain Miranda, saying it was right to stop anyone suspected of possessing "highly sensitive stolen information that would help terrorism."

A law firm representing Miranda has begun legal action against the government, calling his detention unlawful and seeking assurances that British officials would not share the material seized from Miranda with anyone else. In a letter released to The Associated Press, London-based Bindmans called on the government to return a "mobile phone, laptop, memory sticks, smart-watch, DVDs and games consoles" taken from Miranda.

"These items contain sensitive, confidential journalistic material and should not have been seized."

Experts have suggested the government's case is dicey. The piece of legislation used to stop Miranda — Schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act — is especially contentious because it allows police to stop people for passing through airports for up to nine hours without suspicion they have committed an offense.

British legal blogger David Allen Green said Schedule 7 could only be used to determine whether or not a person was a terrorist — and not, as he put it, "a fishing expedition for property."

"If the questioning, detention, and search of Miranda was for a purpose other than to determine if he was a terrorist, then it was unlawful," he said.

David Lowe, a former police officer and academic at Liverpool John Moores University, said in a telephone interview that he believed the government was acting in good faith, although he said he could understand why journalists might be concerned.

He argued that the Snowden leaks could contain details of intelligence operations against groups such as al-Qaida, which he said was where anti-terror laws could come into play.

"It's a thin connection," he acknowledged.

British Home Secretary Theresa May took that line of argument in her comments Tuesday.

"I think it's absolutely right that if the police believe that if somebody is in possession of highly sensitive stolen information that could help terrorists, that could risk lives or lead to a potential loss of life, that the police are able to act, and that's what the law enables them to do," May said.

The role of American officials in the Guardian saga has remained a matter for speculation.

Americans have acknowledged getting advance warning about Miranda' detention, but when White House spokesman Josh Earnest was asked Tuesday whether the U.S. would ever order the destruction of an American media company's hard drives, he said it was "very difficult to imagine a scenario in which that would be appropriate."

http://news.yahoo.com/british-paper-details-confrontation-uk-spies-185902649.html

[Brutus]

Saw this on the news about 4 hours ago. GCHQ are cracking down, it seems

[tuwix]

But the Guardian orginal article suggested that the NSA docs has been copied by jourlaists before those events. So it seems the docs weren't destroyed contrary to the thread title.

[Le Socialiste]

But the Guardian orginal article suggested that the NSA docs has been copied by jourlaists before those events. So it seems the docs weren't destroyed contrary to the thread title.

Well, the hard copies were. And yeah, I realize the title's a bit confusing, but I just copied and pasted the title of the original article.

[Sasha]

BBC is reporting that Cameron personally gave the order with knowledge of Clegg and Hague...

[Sasha]

So the innocent have nothing to fear? After David Miranda we now know where this leads

The destructive power of state snooping is on display for all to see. The press must not yield to this intimidation

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/contributor/2007/10/03/simon_jenkins_140x140.jpg (http://www.theguardian.com/profile/simonjenkins)


Simon Jenkins (http://www.theguardian.com/profile/simonjenkins)
The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian), Tuesday 20 August 2013 20.30 BST
Jump to comments (1158) (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/20/innocent-fear-david-miranda#start-of-comments)



http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/8/20/1377018287662/Eye-graffiti-008.jpg 'But it remains worrying that many otherwise liberal-minded Britons seem reluctant to take seriously the abuses revealed in the nature and growth of state surveillance.' Photograph: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

You've had your fun: now we want the stuff back. With these words the British government embarked on the most bizarre act of state censorship of the internet age. In a Guardian basement, officials from GCHQ gazed with satisfaction on a pile of mangled hard drives like so many book burners sent by the Spanish Inquisition (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters). They were unmoved by the fact that copies of the drives were lodged round the globe. They wanted their symbolic auto-da-fe. Had the Guardian refused this ritual they said they would have obtained a search and destroy order from a compliant British court.
Two great forces are now in fierce but unresolved contention. The material revealed by Edward Snowden (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/edward-snowden-nsa-secrets-glenn-greenwald-laura-poitras) through the Guardian and the Washington Post is of a wholly different order from WikiLeaks (http://www.theguardian.com/media/wikileaks) and other recent whistle-blowing incidents. It indicates not just that the modern state is gathering, storing and processing for its own ends electronic communication from around the world; far more serious, it reveals that this power has so corrupted those wielding it as to put them beyond effective democratic control. It was not the scope of NSA surveillance that led to Snowden's defection. It was hearing his boss lie to Congress about it for hours on end.
Last week in Washington, Congressional investigators discovered that the America's foreign intelligence surveillance court (http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/courts_special_fisc.html), a body set up specifically to oversee the NSA, had itself been defied by the agency (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-broke-privacy-rules-thousands-of-times-per-year-audit-finds/2013/08/15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_print.html) "thousands of times". It was victim to "a culture of misinformation" as orders to destroy intercepts, emails and files were simply disregarded; an intelligence community that seems neither intelligent nor a community commanding a global empire that could suborn the world's largest corporations, draw up targets for drone assassination, blackmail US Muslims into becoming spies and haul passengers off planes.
Yet like all empires, this one has bred its own antibodies. The American (or Anglo-American?) surveillance industry has grown so big by exploiting laws to combat terrorism that it is as impossible to manage internally as it is to control externally. It cannot sustain its own security. Some two million people were reported to have had access to the WikiLeaks material disseminated by Bradley Manning from his Baghdad cell. Snowden himself was a mere employee of a subcontractor to the NSA, yet had full access to its data. The thousands, millions, billions of messages now being devoured daily by US data storage centres may be beyond the dreams of Space Odyssey's HAL 9000. But even HAL proved vulnerable to human morality. Manning and Snowden cannot have been the only US officials to have pondered blowing a whistle on data abuse. There must be hundreds more waiting in the wings – and always will be.
There is clearly a case for prior censorship of some matters of national security. A state secret once revealed cannot be later rectified by a mere denial. Yet the parliamentary and legal institutions for deciding these secrets are plainly no longer fit for purpose. They are treated by the services they supposedly supervise with falsehoods and contempt. In America, the constitution protects the press from pre-publication censorship, leaving those who reveal state secrets to the mercy of the courts and the judgment of public debate – hence the Putinesque treatment of Manning and Snowden. But at least Congress has put the US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, under severe pressure. Even President Barack Obama has welcomed the debate and accepted that the Patriot Act may need revision.
In Britain, there has been no such response. GCHQ could boast to its American counterpart of its "light oversight regime compared to the US". Parliamentary and legal control is a charade, a patsy of the secrecy lobby. The press, normally robust in its treatment of politicians, seems cowed by a regime of informal notification of "defence sensitivity". This D-Notice system (http://www.dnotice.org.uk/) used to be confined to cases where the police felt lives to be at risk in current operations. In the case of Snowden the D-Notice has been used to warn editors off publishing material potentially embarrassing to politicians and the security services under the spurious claim that it "might give comfort to terrorists".
Most of the British press (though not the BBC, to its credit) has clearly felt inhibited. As with the "deterrent" smashing of Guardian hard drives and the harassing of David Miranda at Heathrow (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/david-miranda-reason-detention-lawyers), a regime of prior restraint has been instigated in Britain whose apparent purpose seems to be simply to show off the security services as macho to their American friends.
Those who question the primacy of the "mainstream" media in the digital age should note that it has been two traditional newspapers, in London and Washington, that have researched, co-ordinated and edited the Snowden revelations. They have even held back material that the NSA and GCHQ had proved unable to protect. No blog, Twitter or Facebook campaign has the resources or the clout to confront the power of the state.
There is no conceivable way copies of the Snowden revelations seized this week at Heathrow could aid terrorism or "threaten the security of the British state" – as charged today by Mark Pritchard (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23769324), an MP on the parliamentary committee on national security strategy. When the supposed monitors of the secret services merely parrot their jargon against press freedom, we should know this regime is not up to its job.
The war between state power and those holding it to account needs constant refreshment. As Snowden shows, the whistleblowers and hacktivists can win the occasional skirmish. But it remains worrying that many otherwise liberal-minded Britons seem reluctant to take seriously the abuses revealed in the nature and growth of state surveillance. The arrogance of this abuse is now widespread. The same police force that harassed Miranda for nine hours at Heathrow is the one recently revealed as using surveillance to blackmail Lawrence family supporters and draw up lists of trouble-makers to hand over to private contractors. We can see where this leads.
I hesitate to draw parallels with history, but I wonder how those now running the surveillance state – and their appeasers – would have behaved under the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. We hear today so many phrases we have heard before. The innocent have nothing to fear. Our critics merely comfort the enemy. You cannot be too safe. Loyalty is all. As one official said in wielding his legal stick over the Guardian: "You have had your debate. There's no need to write any more."
Yes, there bloody well is.



source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/20/innocent-fear-david-miranda

[Sasha]

live updates: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/aug/21/nsa-files-david-miranda-detention-latest-news

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

But the Guardian orginal article suggested that the NSA docs has been copied by jourlaists before those events. So it seems the docs weren't destroyed contrary to the thread title.

They forced them to destroy hard drives containing the documents in the basement. Obviously this wouldn't actually destroy the documents and they know that, this was done to send a message to journalists.