“In a Guardian basement, officials from GCHQ gazed with satisfaction on a pile of mangled hard drives like so many book burners sent by the Spanish Inquisition.” ON DAVID CAMERON'S ORDERS!!! +

So the innocent have nothing to fear? After David Miranda we now know where this leads

The destructive power of state snooping is on display for all to see. The press must not yield to this intimidation

But it remains worrying that many otherwise liberal-minded Britons seem reluctant to take seriously the abuses revealed in the nature and growth of state surveillance.'

By Simon Jenkins: 'You've had your fun: now we want the stuff back. With these words the British government embarked on the most bizarre act of state censorship of the internet age. In a Guardian basement, officials from GCHQ gazed with satisfaction on a pile of mangled hard drives like so many book burners sent by the Spanish Inquisition. They were unmoved by the fact that copies of the drives were lodged round the globe. They wanted their symbolic auto-da-fe. Had the Guardian refused this ritual they said they would have obtained a search and destroy order from a compliant British court.
Two great forces are now in fierce but unresolved contention. The material revealed by Edward Snowden through the Guardian and the Washington Post is of a wholly different order from WikiLeaks and other recent whistle-blowing incidents. It indicates not just that the modern state is gathering, storing and processing for its own ends electronic communication from around the world; far more serious, it reveals that this power has so corrupted those wielding it as to put them beyond effective democratic control. It was not the scope of NSA surveillance that led to Snowden's defection. It was hearing his boss lie to Congress about it for hours on end.

Last week in Washington, Congressional investigators discovered that the America's foreign intelligence surveillance court, a body set up specifically to oversee the NSA, had itself been defied by the agency "thousands of times". It was victim to "a culture of misinformation" as orders to destroy intercepts, emails and files were simply disregarded; an intelligence community that seems neither intelligent nor a community commanding a global empire that could suborn the world's largest corporations, draw up targets for drone assassination, blackmail US Muslims into becoming spies and haul passengers off planes.
Yet like all empires, this one has bred its own antibodies. The American (or Anglo-American?) surveillance industry has grown so big by exploiting laws to combat terrorism that it is as impossible to manage internally as it is to control externally. It cannot sustain its own security. Some two million people were reported to have had access to the WikiLeaks material disseminated by Bradley Manning from his Baghdad cell. Snowden himself was a mere employee of a subcontractor to the NSA, yet had full access to its data. The thousands, millions, billions of messages now being devoured daily by US data storage centres may be beyond the dreams of Space Odyssey's HAL 9000. But even HAL proved vulnerable to human morality. Manning and Snowden cannot have been the only US officials to have pondered blowing a whistle on data abuse. There must be hundreds more waiting in the wings – and always will be.
There is clearly a case for prior censorship of some matters of national security. A state secret once revealed cannot be later rectified by a mere denial. Yet the parliamentary and legal institutions for deciding these secrets are plainly no longer fit for purpose. They are treated by the services they supposedly supervise with falsehoods and contempt. In America, the constitution protects the press from pre-publication censorship, leaving those who reveal state secrets to the mercy of the courts and the judgment of public debate – hence the Putinesque treatment of Manning and Snowden. But at least Congress has put the US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, under severe pressure. Even President Barack Obama has welcomed the debate and accepted that the Patriot Act may need revision.
In Britain, there has been no such response. GCHQ could boast to its American counterpart of its "light oversight regime compared to the US". Parliamentary and legal control is a charade, a patsy of the secrecy lobby. The press, normally robust in its treatment of politicians, seems cowed by a regime of informal notification of "defence sensitivity". This D-Notice system used to be confined to cases where the police felt lives to be at risk in current operations. In the case of Snowden the D-Notice has been used to warn editors off publishing material potentially embarrassing to politicians and the security services under the spurious claim that it "might give comfort to terrorists".
Most of the British press (though not the BBC, to its credit) has clearly felt inhibited. As with the "deterrent" smashing of Guardian hard drives and the harassing of David Miranda at Heathrow, a regime of prior restraint has been instigated in Britain whose apparent purpose seems to be simply to show off the security services as macho to their American friends.
Those who question the primacy of the "mainstream" media in the digital age should note that it has been two traditional newspapers, in London and Washington, that have researched, co-ordinated and edited the Snowden revelations. They have even held back material that the NSA and GCHQ had proved unable to protect. No blog, Twitter or Facebook campaign has the resources or the clout to confront the power of the state.
There is no conceivable way copies of the Snowden revelations seized this week at Heathrow could aid terrorism or "threaten the security of the British state" – as charged today by Mark Pritchard, an MP on the parliamentary committee on national security strategy. When the supposed monitors of the secret services merely parrot their jargon against press freedom, we should know this regime is not up to its job.
The war between state power and those holding it to account needs constant refreshment. As Snowden shows, the whistleblowers and hacktivists can win the occasional skirmish. But it remains worrying that many otherwise liberal-minded Britons seem reluctant to take seriously the abuses revealed in the nature and growth of state surveillance. The arrogance of this abuse is now widespread. The same police force that harassed Miranda for nine hours at Heathrow is the one recently revealed as using surveillance to blackmail Lawrence family supporters and draw up lists of trouble-makers to hand over to private contractors. We can see where this leads.
I hesitate to draw parallels with history, but I wonder how those now running the surveillance state – and their appeasers – would have behaved under the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. We hear today so many phrases we have heard before. The innocent have nothing to fear. Our critics merely comfort the enemy. You cannot be too safe. Loyalty is all. As one official said in wielding his legal stick over the Guardian: "You have had your debate. There's no need to write any more."
Yes, there bloody well is.

Photograph: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

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Additional:

David Cameron told Cabinet Secretary to get Guardian to hand over Edward Snowden documents

David Cameron instructed the Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to contact The Guardian to spell out the serious consequences that could follow if it failed to hand over classified material received from Edward Snowden, it can be revealed.

Senior Whitehall sources confirmed to The Independent the Prime Minister’s central role in trying to limit revelations about UK and US intelligence operations contained in information the whistleblower received from the National Security Agency.

News of Mr Cameron’s direct intervention came as official Home Office and Scotland Yard accounts of the nine hour detention at Heathrow of the Brazilian partner of a Guardian investigative journalist were flatly contradicted by lawyers involved in the airport ordeal. According to the Metropolitan Police, David Miranda – whose partner Glenn Greenwald has led the reporting of stories linked to NSA material supplied by Mr Snowden – was offered legal representation during his questioning and a solicitor was in attendance.

The Home Office also claimed the detention was “legally and procedurally sound” and backed in full the Met’s account.

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, confirmed she had been briefed in advance of the detention, but insisted it was the police who had made the decision to stop and question Mr Miranda on his way through Heathrow from Berlin. These accounts do not match descriptions given by the Brazilian’s legal representative who eventually made his way to the transit area at Heathrow where Mr Miranda was being held.

Gwendolen Morgan, a solicitor at Bindmans who is representing Mr Miranda in challenging the legality of his detention, said: “It is incorrect that Mr Miranda was offered legal representation.

“When we were told by The Guardian [of the detention], Gavin Kendall from our legal department was sent to Heathrow. “He was persistently blocked by officials for a long period from gaining access to the room where the questioning was taking place. The detention lasted nine hours, the legal limit of Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. Gavin finally gained access only during the last hour.”

Mr Kendall said that Mr Miranda’s request for a pen or pencil to write down details of the questions he was asked was repeatedly refused. He says he was also unclear about just who was questioning him.

The Home Office claim the questioning was “a Met-led operation” and involved six people. Scotland Yard stated it could not comment on who may or may not have been involved.

However security sources contacted by The Independent admit MI6 officials could have been involved. Bindmans said this account did not surprise them. “It was unclear throughout just who exactly was doing the questioning,” said Ms Morgan. Mr Miranda’s legal team in London are preparing an injunction which will demand a judicial review of the way the Schedule 7 anti-terrorism law was used against him.

His lawyers have also demanded the government explain at whose request, and for what purpose, the police seized “sensitive journalistic material” during his detention.

The UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson QC, is scheduled to meet representatives from the Metropolitan police this week. Their discussions will centre on the “unusual” length of the detention period.

Downing Street’s insistence this week that the arrest of Mr Miranda was entirely an “operational matter” for Scotland Yard, does not sit easily with the Prime Minister’s hands-on involvement in Jeremy Heywood’s contact with Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor.

Government sources deny the Prime Minister was involved in “intimidation” of a Fleet Street editor. One source said “There was no injunction, no arrests. We just wanted to get these documents [in Snowden’s possession] back.”

It was suggested that inside Number 10, Sir Jeremy had been tasked with warning The Guardian of the “dangers of holding highly sensitive information on insecure servers [computers] that could damage Britain.”

It was denied that the Cabinet Secretary’s contact with Mr Rusbridger was “threatening”. The source suggested: “We had a mature conversation.”

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Additional:
The Guardian forced to destroy hard drives of leaked NSA files or face government legal action 

By Madison Ruppert: On July 20, the Guardian was reportedly forced to either surrender their hard drives containing National Security Agency (NSA) files leaked by Edward Snowden or destroy them. They chose the latter, according to the paper.
The Guardian has been responsible for publishing many of the leaks, helping reveal everything from PRISM to massive GCHQ spying operations. The leaks have also helped jettison NSA surveillance back into the public eye and forced individuals in Washington to address the practice.
It is not all that surprising then to learn that a senior editor for the Guardian along with one of their computer experts used grinders and other tools to ruin the devices on which Snowden’s leaked files were stored.
Despite the editor, Alan Rusbridger, telling British government authorities that other copies of the files existed outside of the country and that the Guardian did not control all of them, “the government insisted that the material be either destroyed or surrendered,” according to the paper.
The destruction was reportedly watched by GCHQ technicians who took photographs and notes but “left empty-handed.”
According to the Guardian, the first attempts by UK authorities to stop the reporting on the leaked NSA files began just two weeks after the first story was published about the secret court order which forced Verizon to give the U.S. government all of their customers’ records.
Initially, the paper reports that the senior British officials who showed up at their officers were cordial while making it “clear they came on high authority to demand the immediate surrender of all the Snowden files in the Guardian’s possession.”
After paper held on to the materials and continued publishing more articles about NSA and GCHQ surveillance over the next three weeks, officials made contact again.
This time around, they took a more harsh approach, according to the paper, saying, “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.”
Pressure continued to intensify after the Guardian reportedly continued to hold on to the documents until, “the threat of legal action or even a police raid became more explicit.”
“We are giving active consideration to the legal route,” the paper was reportedly told at one point.
Eventually, they agreed to destroy the material after talking to government officials.
“But it was largely a symbolic act,” the Guardian reported. “Both sides were well aware that other copies existed outside the UK and that the reporting on the reach of state surveillance in the 21st century would continue.”
The White House has made moves to distance itself from the destruction of the materials.
“It’s very difficult to imagine a scenario in which that would be appropriate here,” White House deputy spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday, according to the Guardian.
While the U.S. has “greater legal protections for journalism than the UK does,” according to the Guardian, “Earnest did not say such destruction was impossible to imagine.”
Indeed, as the paper points out, it has happened in the past, though the documents were “inadvertently released and disseminated classified material.”
“This is police-state stuff,” Ryan Chittum wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review. “We need to know the American government’s role in these events—and its stance on them—sooner rather than later.”
For now, Washington is tight-lipped on the matter. Earnest wouldn’t criticize the British government and said since they only know about the incident through what has been publicly reported, it is hard to “evaluate the propriety of that.”
It would be quite surprising if the White House really knew nothing beyond what was reported in the Guardian, especially since the UK and U.S. are such close allies and have both been cast in a bad light by the leaks.

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