David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face

Found on The Guardian on Tuesday, 20 August 2013
Browse Censorship

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."

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.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Looks like the people are doing everything right and the governments are getting scared. It's just baffling that nobody from the GHCQ ever thought that the data was already mirrored world-wide (in the Wikileaks torrent released two days ago maybe?) and this desctruction was pointless; it does even work against them; better than any propaganda could.