Video of GCHQ ordering the Guardian to destroy laptops. [View all]

[Savannahmann]

By now, everyone knows the story of how the British Secret Intelligence threatened the Guardian to compel the paper to destroy the information obtained by Snowden. The video of the destruction is now available, and the story behind how Snowden got the files is the subject of a book being released next week. One can only assume that the NSA/GCHQ has finished reading it, since they probably hacked the computer of the author Luke Harding and was reading it as he typed it.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-released-guardian-editors-snowden-hard-drives-gchq

Under the watchful gaze of two technicians from the British government spy agency GCHQ, the journalists took angle-grinders and drills to the internal components, rendering them useless and the information on them obliterated.

The bizarre episode in the basement of the Guardian's London HQ was the climax of Downing Street's fraught interactions with the Guardian in the wake of Snowden's leak – the biggest in the history of western intelligence. The details are revealed in a new book – The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man – by the Guardian correspondent Luke Harding. The book, published next week, describes how the Guardian took the decision to destroy its own Macbooks after the government explicitly threatened the paper with an injunction.

What do they mean, threatened the paper with an injunction? It means shutting the paper down until the Government gives them permission to resume operations. Yes, I know, the British don't have the Freedom of the Press we have in the United States. Although, it would be hard to really quantify the so called Freedom of the Press in the United States, at least we have the illusion, if not the factual protections.

The video of the destruction is at the link, and if anything it demonstrates the outright stupidity of the Intelligence Services. The information was not contained in one place, they did nothing to stop the flow of information, they just revealed the face of a petulant big brother. Do what we say or we will ruin you. The stories continue, books are being written, and the information is still getting out much to the chagrin of the Authoritarians. Each revealed piece of information has them snarling and wishing that Snowden was dead, and his information safely contained in a network accessible by nearly a million people in the United States alone.

Each night, the Authoritarians and defenders of the faith pray that someone will put a bullet in Snowden, before someone else gets the idea that opposing them is something that can be done with relative impunity. I'm sure they're are at least a half dozen umbrella guns in Moscow while Jason Borne wannabe's wait for the go code to come through.