The editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, disclosed on Monday that the British government had sent officials from Government Communications Headquarters, which is known as GCHQ and is the British version of the National Security Agency, to the newspaper’s offices in London to destroy computers containing documents leaked by Mr. Snowden. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/world/europe/britons-question-whether-detention-of-reporters-partner-was-terror-related.html?ref=world Mr. Rusbridger said that he had protested that the same information was available elsewhere, but that the officials had insisted on proceeding. “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,” he wrote, adding, “We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won’t do it in London.”
Demands grew on Monday for the British government to explain why it had used antiterrorism powers to detain the partner of a journalist who has written about surveillance programs based on leaks by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.
Nick Cohen, a columnist for the conservative weekly The Spectator, wrote on Monday that the detention of David Michael Miranda was “a clarifying moment that reveals how far Britain has changed for the worse.”
Nearly everyone, Mr. Cohen wrote, suspects that the police held Mr. Miranda “on trumped-up charges because the police, at the behest of the Americans, wanted to intimidate Miranda’s partner, Glenn Greenwald, the conduit of Edward Snowden’s revelations, and find out whether more embarrassing information is on Greenwald’s laptop.”
He criticized the police for saying so little about the case, and concluded: “The next time they try to tell you that the secrecy and attempts to silence legitimate debate are ‘in the public interest,’ do not forget what they did to David Miranda, because they can do it to you, too.”