U.K. Ordered Guardian to Destroy Snowden Files Because Its Servers Weren’t Secure [View all]

[bemildred]

New trial balloon.

After NSA insider Edward Snowden absconded with thousands of sensitive U.S. government documents from unsecured NSA servers earlier this year and gave them to the Guardian newspaper, a U.K. spy agency forced the paper to destroy hard drives containing copies of the documents because the agency said the newspaper’s servers were not secure.

The U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, claimed that Russia or China could hack into the Guardian’s IT network and access the documents.

Although the Guardian insisted that the documents were not stored on its network and were secure, an intelligence agency expert argued that they were still vulnerable.

To illustrate how the information was still at risk, he told editors that foreign agents could train a laser on “a plastic cup in the room where the work was being carried out … to pick up the vibrations of what was being said” there. Vibrations on windows could similarly be monitored remotely by laser.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/guardian-snowden-files-destroyed/