The Guardian office in London says it decided to destroy computer hard drives containing copies of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden after the UK government threatened legal action that could have suspended its reporting on government surveillance operations detailed in the documents.
And here's Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger tweeting it out:
Here's a Guardian MacBook Pro after dismemberment to the highest UK Government standards pic.twitter.com/TTY0llr46R
— alan rusbridger (@arusbridger) August 20, 2013
In a post explaining the decision, Rusbridger said:
The intelligence men stood over [two Guardian employees] as they went to work on the hard drives and memory chips with angle grinders and drills, pointing out the critical points on circuit boards to attack. They took pictures as the debris was swept up but took nothing away.
Rusbridger notes that the pile of parts "includes with a bit of PC mixed in."