We have the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 to thank for the fact that it established a ruling at the Supreme Court that said that the government can't walk into a newsroom and injunct them and prevent them from publishing. You can certainly hold an editor responsible in retrospect, but you can't stop them from publishing, unless you can show overwhelming cause. Now, in Britain we don't have that, and I always suspected with the Snowden story that there might come a point where the government would walk into the Guardian offices and prevent us from publishing — and that's exactly what they did.
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It turns out that it's remarkably difficult to damage a computer so that it's of no use to anybody else. It involved a very elaborate, dusty, noisy morning in the basement of the Guardian with drills and angled drivers and ... all kinds of weird equipment destroying specific chips and bits of the keyboard, bits of the hard drive, and bits of the memory board under the watchful eye of GCHQ [the Government Communications Headquarters]. That's the equivalent of the NSA technicians.
It seemed to me a piece of theater, because I had told them that we had a copy in New York with The New York Times and with ProPublica. And so this was not going to stop our reporting, but it seemed like a piece of theater to be able to say to somebody, "Look, we've smashed up The Guardian's computers," and somebody would feel better. ...
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