The Snowden Leaks

A bunch of stuff has happened recently regarding the Snowden leaks about the NSA spying. Glen Greenwald has this to say at the UK Guardian:

David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face
In a private viewing cinema in Soho last week I caught myself letting fly with a four-letter expletive at Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times. It was a confusing moment. The man who was pretending to be me � thanking Keller for "not giving a shit" � used to be Malcolm Tucker, a foul-mouthed Scottish spin doctor who will soon be a 1,000-year-old time lord. And Keller will correct me, but I don't remember ever swearing at him. I do remember saying something to the effect of "we have the thumb drive, you have the first amendment".

The fictional moment occurs at the beginning of the DreamWorks film about WikiLeaks, The Fifth Estate, due for release next month. Peter Capaldi is, I can report, a very plausible Guardian editor.

This real-life exchange with Keller happened just after we took possession of the first tranche of WikiLeaks documents in 2010. I strongly suspected that our ability to research and publish anything to do with this trove of secret material would be severely constrained in the UK. America, for all its own problems with media laws and whistleblowers, at least has press freedom enshrined in a written constitution. It is also, I hope, unthinkable that any US government would attempt prior restraint against a news organisation planning to publish material that informed an important public debate, however troublesome or embarrassing.

And a bit more:

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

Emphasis mine -- yes, the hard drives were destroyed. And, I am willing to bet that no, these were not the sole repositories for the data. It has been cast to the four corners of the Earth. One of the 700+ comments was very apropos:

███████████ so and ██████ ██████████ ██████ but █████████ ██████ ███ ██████ if ██████ ██ ████████ government works.

Orwell was 29 years too early.