Surveillance theatre

Given the sheer pointlessness of :
1) destroying the Guardian copy of Snowden hard drive data after being informed there were two other copies in existence elsewhere anyway, and 
2) detaining Greenwald's partner Miranda for 9 hours under a terrorism statute when they knew he isn't a terrorist
we are reliably inclined to view this as a clear intent to intimidate the Guardian and Greenwald, as well as any other media with the audacity not to equate journalism with terrorism. 

But there may be another possibility.

In this Guardian article published earlier this month based on Edward Snowden's cache of docs, we learned the USA has supplemented the GCHQ's budget to the tune of 

"£100m over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes" 

It contains a number of quotes from GCHQ officials wittering on about whether they were "seen to be pulling their weight" and doing enough to keep the NSA happy. The US is apparently pleased with the GCHQ's "selling point" as a "light oversight regime compared to the US", and also presumably with the UK's laws of prior restraint, not available in the US, to muzzle the British press. However the US had 

"raised a number of issues with regards to meeting NSA's minimum expectations". It said GCHQ "still remains short of the full NSA ask".

UK's biggest fear is that "US perceptions of the … partnership diminish, leading to loss of access, and/or reduction in investment … to the UK" 

GCHQ said that by 2013 it hoped to have "exploited to the full our unique selling points of geography, partnerships [and] the UK's legal regime" 

So as successful as the seemingly pointless tactics against Greenwald and the Guardian may yet prove to be as intimidation, it's possible the actual intent here was two acts of detain and destroy surveillance theatre designed to display GCHQ loyalty and usefulness to their heavy maintenance NSA investors. 
.

If everything is under surveillance ...

A powerful two minutes with Jacob Appelbaum of Tor Project and Der Spiegel. 
Mr. Appelbaum has been flagged and detained many times like Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda was at Heathrow three days ago. An American citizen, he no longer travels to the US.

Wall Street Journal, Aug 20 2013 :

"The NSA, in conjunction with telecommunications companies, has built a system that can reach deep into the U.S. Internet backbone and cover 75% of traffic in the country, including not only metadata but the content of online communications."

The Guardian, Aug 1 2013

"The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes. The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands. 

Ministers have denied that GCHQ does the NSA's "dirty work", but in the documents GCHQ describes Britain's surveillance laws and regulatory regime as a "selling point" for the Americans.

Appelbaum transcript:

"I think at its core what is at stake is the ability for a human being to have dignity and for journalists to have integrity with their sources, and from that I believe that it threatens the whole concept of a free democracy.

This is I think in a sense being shown in the last 48 hours to the extreme and I don't mean that as hyperbole but if everything is under surveillance, how is it that you can have a democracy? 

How is it that you can organize a political function or have confidentiality with a constituent or with a source or with a friend or with the lover?

That's fundamentally an erasure of fundamental things that we have had for quite some time.

And planetary surveillance has very serious concerns, not the least of which is economic espionage and not the least of which I think for me personally is about journalistic source protection.

I mean how is it that we will be able to protect our sources if there's no way to securely meet, no way to communicate about having a meeting, no way to actually communicate about basic facts? 

There's no such thing as on or off the record when in fact you don't control the record.

And it's not merely a matter of whether or not we have something to hide because it is not us that will decide whether we have something to hide - it is an analyst somewhere, it is a machine learning algorithm somewhere. And this is the thing that is perhaps the most terrifying : because people are flagged, then other people are dispatched. Each person plays their role and more and more a machine plays that role, a machine that does not understand constitutional protections, does not understand the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, does not understand humanity. It's a machine and the humans they behave like machines too - which is a great fear - that humans will start to behave like machines. 

And so what is at stake is in fact democracy where we still have it."

Pink Floyd, 1975
"Welcome, my son, welcome to the machine.
Where have you been? It's alright we know where you've been."

h/t West End Bob for Democracy Now link.

.

UK destroys The Guardian's "Snowden" hard drives

Just as we are absorbing yesterday's news that Glenn Greenwald's domestic partner was detained at London's Heathrow Airport for 9 hours under Schedule 7 of the UK's Terrorism Act while they asked him all about Greenwald and whistleblower Edward Snowden ?!?! ... comes this column today from the Guardian's Editor-in-Chief, Alan Rusbridge :
David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face

In it he describes how two months of visits from "senior government officials" demanding he hand over the Edward Snowden material culminated in an ultimatum a month ago :  

"..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 Government Communications Headquarters security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement ..."

 "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro."

Extraordinary. This is tantamount to the Inquisition taking away Galileo's pencil.
Thumb drives and crowd sourcing be damned! The truth will only revolve around whatever the surveillance state says it is.
Rusbridger : 

"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 smashing of the Guardian's hard drives and the detention of Greenwald's partner under UK terrorism laws is not about containment or security or catching members of alQaida, is it?  It's about laying down fear of the state into any reporter or publisher who would embarrass them. 

"One U.S. security official told Reuters that one of the main purposes of the British government's detention and questioning of Miranda was to send a message to recipients of Snowden's materials, including the Guardian, that the British government was serious about trying to shut down the leaks."

So the UK gave the US a heads up on Miranda?
Yeah, well, good luck with your whole confiscating the pencils thing.

Related : Did Canada spy on journos at the Toronto G8/20 summit?
.

1am Update : Most of the over 1600 comments under the Guardian editor's article are both outraged at the gov's actions and grateful for the editor's courage, but hundreds of them challenge the Guardian on two questions to which Rusbridger occasionally responds :

1) Why didn't the Guardian publish news of this hard drive smashing immediately?
Rusbridger: "we had our reasons. can't go into everything."

and 2)Why didn't the Guardian force the gov to take them to court rather than capitulate, thereby driving the gov's actions into the open?
Rusbridger : "UK would have gone to law (as threatened). From that moment the court would be in charge of the Snowden material. The penalty for destroying it or refusing to hand it over could be extremely punitive. I mean, unlimited fines - not jail ."

As to why Rusbridger buried his lede 9 paragraphs into the article : "sorry, couldn't help that"
the destruction of the data? : "er, well, not quite. We destroyed something... of which we had had least two other copies."

And most interestingly, why didn't the gov confiscate the drives to inspect them instead of destroying them?
Rusbridger : "They never touched the hard drives, so, no they got nothing from them. I don't know what they know..."
.