BBC censors the Smashing of Guardian’s Hard Drives

Today 20th August I  can find no mention in the BBC online that their sister media outlet The Guardian was forced by police to destroy hard drives with leaked info of US security crimes, in their basement yesterday. Incredible but I just spent half an hour searching, check yourself!. ah, but of course, the BBC is controlled by the British Government. A story that is second most popular in the Washington Post ISN’T WORTH REPORTING the next day in the BBC. Is this pre-nazi Germany or what?!

The police destruction of hard disks at The Guardian newspaper is unlikely to stop revelations about the criminal activities of the 1%.. Nor will the seizure by terrorist police of journalist Miranda’s laptop the day before. Really the Guardian let UK spooks trash ‘Snowden files’ PCs , as there are obviously copies stashed around the world.

Seems like it worked in shutting up the BBC! This is symbolic  then, the aim must be  rather to terrorize other media into not publishing the truth.

However it does show they are desperate and willing to do almost anything to stop the leaks. So what else is still to come out?? The reporters Greenwald and Miranda have vowed to continue their stories with ‘new bombshells’, but would be well advised to ‘spread the risk’ and look out for ‘accidents’, or even drones and high tech attacks.. really it’s coming to that!

The Guardian and the Miranda attacks, the grounding of President Morales´plane on suspìcion, etc are blatant terrorist acts, adding to and compounding the wholesale crimes exposed by Snowden.

The US obviously cares less about further alienating world opinion than they do about letting more dirty secrets escape.

Here’s the original post from the director of The Guardian..

not worth a mention today in the BBC, though they have over 2775 comments and  18,000 shares so far!

………long part about Miranda……………………………..  ”A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.

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.

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won’t do it in London. The seizure of Miranda’s laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald’s work.

The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes – and, increasingly, it looks like “when”.

We are not there yet, but it may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to have confidential sources. Most reporting – indeed, most human life in 2013 – leaves too much of a digital fingerprint. Those colleagues who denigrate Snowden or say reporters should trust the state to know best (many of them in the UK, oddly, on the right) may one day have a cruel awakening. One day it will be their reporting, their cause, under attack. But at least reporters now know to stay away from Heathrow transit lounges”.  fin

• 
• • Alan Rusbridger
  • The Guardian, Monday 19 August 2013 22.30 BST
  • Jump to comments (2775)
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Author: thefreeonline

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