It still feels shocking, even two years later. In the land of Magna Carta, in the country that celebrates John Wilkes and press freedom, two government officials came into the Guardian and oversaw the destruction of computer hard drives and memory chips.
The Guardian came under pressure both in the US and in the UK to stop publication of stories based on top secret documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. There were threats in the UK of court injunctions and criminal prosecution. The partner of one of the then Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald was held for nine hours at Heathrow under terrorism legislation.
But the enduring image is the destruction of the hard drives and memory chips in the Guardian’s basement, watched over by the two officials from the British surveillance agency GCHQ. The event is marked by the V&A museum which is exhibiting the debris.
None of this pressure had any impact on the Guardian, which carried on reporting the Snowden documents, helping to promote a worldwide debate on the balance between surveillance and privacy. Vindication came recently when a US federal appeals court ruled mass data collection illegal.
I was one of the journalists involved in the story, sent to Hong Kong to check if the then unknown source was real: he was. I contacted the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger at one point from Hong Kong to check if we would hand over the GCHQ documents to the authorities or publish them. Based on the Guardian’s history, I already knew the answer. The Guardian has long demonstrated it is not averse to risk and we enjoy rare freedom and independence.
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