NSA Story Jumps the Shark!
(UPDATED 8/20/13) We have entered bad Pakistani rip-off of a James Bond movie territory…and I apologize to Pakistan–words have simply failed me!
UPDATE: The Guardian also has a LIVE BLOG on the detention of David Miranda for 9 hrs by UK security officials. Here’s a rather statist video interview on the subject:
UK ‘intelligence’ officials entered into the Guardian’s London headquarters and destroyed hard drives containing copies of some of documents revealed by Edward Snowden. The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, explains that he is now forced to work on stories about the US National Security Administration from New York City or other locations:
Here's exclusive video of UK officials searching the @Guardian hard drives http://t.co/bcQPf2x1CQ
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) August 19, 2013
The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.”
During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian’s reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government’s intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks – the thumb drive and the first amendment – had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?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.
The author, Alan Rusbridger, is responding to comments. Read the full piece here:
And now this…
REUTERS: “One U.S. security official told Reuters that one of the main purposes of the British government’s detention and questioning of Miranda was to send a message to recipients of Snowden’s materials, including the Guardian, that the British government was serious about trying to shut down the leaks.”