This feels worse than book burning.

I've generally given GCHQ an easy ride but this is pretty fuckin dodgy.

When someone burns a book or a flag they're just saying "I really hate this book and the ideas in it" - and it's great that people do this so visibly because it means I know how to talk to them.

But government agents watching while journalists destroy journalistic materials to protect other journalists? That's something that must not happen in Britain again.

Wouldn't it be a lot worse if the government agents had seized the drives, arrested the journalists, and gone on a witchhunt to root out everyone else who was involved? As it was the Guardian journalists stood on principle and said 'we really don't want to hand this over' so the GCHQ chaps helpfully sat around and let them destroy the evidence. This is really quite a reasonable compromise.

A reasonable compromise? Any compromise is reasonable when your starting point is extreme enough. Saying "well it could have been a lot worse" is a cop out. It shouldn't have happened at all.

I would audit the living heck out of everything after letting GCHQ have access to my building.

I doubt the grauniad have even checked for clumsy kludges like keyghost USB keyboard sniffers.

OK, but what does that have to do with what I posted above?

Also, if you think spooks only come in the front door you don't have any security anyway. More so in the UK, with the extremely stringent Official Secrets Act.

My guess is this was mostly a move by the editors.

Gov illegally orders them to hand over drivers that contain data that can be used to further compromise snowden.

They argue the reason for the order. Gov says it is to prevent it from being published.

Editors wisely say, ok, we will destroy it in front of you then. while also winning some page views by recording it.

I don't think the gov was even wanting to 'burn books'. i think it got shafted by it.

I don't fully buy it. The government would likely find a huge amount of value in knowing exactly what was leaked.

that was exactly what i said.

the editors called them on the bluff that it was to prevent extra leaks, when everyone knows the gov wants the data to further prosecute leakers.

The only thing worse than a clueless thug is a thug who has a clue. The only thing worse than a thug with a clue is a thug who knows that he's right, and is on some kind of holy mission.

In the US they'd just whip an NSL on the paper. I wonder how many times this has happened?

Huh? NSL? US papers obviously did cover this story and, as far as I know, no US hard drives were required to be destroyed.

Fair point, we haven't heard of a similar thing happening in the US. However, I'm not convinced we would have heard about it happening.

Consider, this is a _US invention_: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

How do you mean? To me, this looks like the paper trying to protect itself, by keeping what exactly they read in those files secret. They weren't cooperating, but they also weren't willing to take the government to court.