Ultimate 12 months British-based totally newspaper The Guardian was compelled to damage arduous drives with information provided by Edward Snowden, and now the paper has released video of these laborious drives being destroyed whereas British intelligence officials stand there and watch. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger printed last August that a senior government respectable demanded the “destruction of all the subject material we had been engaged on” associated to Snowden and the revelations over govt surveillance by means of the NSA and GCHQ, Britain’s intelligence company. And now there may be video of that very destruction occurring, with intelligence officials staring at it.

The Guardian additionally has more small print about the situations of the hard drives getting obliterated beyond all use.

Beneath the watchful gaze of two technicians from the British government secret agent company GCHQ, the journalists took angle-grinders and drills to the interior components, rendering them useless and the information on them obliterated…

With the threat of punitive criminal motion ever existing, the one approach of defending the Guardian’s workforce – and of carrying on reporting from some other jurisdiction – used to be for the paper to wreck its own computer systems. GCHQ officials needed to inspect the material before destruction, carry out the operation themselves and take the remnants away. The Guardian refused.

After the destruction on Saturday 20 July, reporting switched completely to the US. Despite these tensions, the paper continued to seek the advice of with the federal government sooner than publishing national security stories. There were greater than a hundred interactions with No 10, the White House and US and UK intelligence businesses.

Glenn Greenwald wrote most of his NSA exposés for The Guardian earlier than leaving to start a new media enterprise.

Watch the video beneath, by means of The Guardian:


[h/t HuffPost]

[picture by means of screengrab]

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Apply Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac