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You haven't understood what is going on. Making them destroy a bunch of stuff from the IT room junkbox was Cameron letting them off.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

The picture certainly shows the remains of a MacBook: its casing - said separately by Rusbridger to be a MacBook Pro, but which might actually be an Air; it looks too thin to be a Pro - and its motherboard. But Guardian snapper Roger Tooth's photo also contains what is clearly a second MacBook mobo, along with an old graphics card - an AMD job, we'd say; you can see the three output connectors on the backplane - and another motherboard, possibly a small desktop computer or maybe another device, given the large areas empty of circuitry.

Destroying the graphics card shows they know nothing about computers. Or maybe they're being disingenuous.

https://www.headoflegal.com/20...

A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on ...

There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. ...

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. ...

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

So they destroyed an old Macbook and old graphics card and thus met the destruction part of the Snowden material rather than handing it back.

As the site points out

By taking the less dramatic of the options open to him, Rusbridger has preserved his paper's ability to publish without immediate constraint - and it may well end up being able to publish more than if he'd taken the other route. His decision seems to me fully justified.

I.e. the Guardian still had copies of the Snowden stuff in the US and so long as the published from there, the angle grinding old IT scrap performance meant they were legally in the clear and didn't need to handover what they had.

https://www.theguardian.com/co...

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks - the thumb drive and the first amendment - had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him t

It doesn't matter. The High Court got it wrong in any case.

Err no. It's because of the way the Official Secrets Act 1989 works

http://www.headoflegal.com/201...

This language makes me wonder whether the Guardian was facing an "official direction" for the return or disposal of the material under section 8(5) of the Official Secrets Act 1989.

It would be an offence under section 6(2) of the Act for the Guardian to knowingly make a damaging disclosure of any information, document or other article which (section 6(1)(a))

(i) relates to security or intelligence, defence or international relations; and

(ii) has been communicated in confidence by or on behalf of the United Kingdom to another State ...

and (also section 6(1)(a))

has come into a person's possession as a result of having been disclosed (whether to him or another) without the authority of that State ...

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden about the work of GCHQ must I think fall within the scope of section 6(1), having presumably been communicated in confidence by the UK intelligence agencies to another state, the US, and having come into the Guardian's possession without US authority.

If that's right, then, as I've said, the Guardian and its editor would risk committing an offence if it published any of that information which was "damaging". By the interaction of section 6(4) and section 1(4)(a), by the way, disclosure of security or intelligence information would be "damaging" if (section 1(4)(a))

it causes damage to the work of, or of any part of, the security and intelligence services

In those circumstances, section 8(5) would apply. It says

Where a person has in his possession or under his control any document or other article which it would be an offence under section 6 above for him to disclose without lawful authority, he is guilty of an offence if he fails to comply with an official direction for its return or disposal.

This all dates back to when secret documents were not digital - e.g. paper or microfilm. If you had them you'd could be directed to "return or dispose[destroy]" them. And if you failed you could be prosecuted.

Incidentally if you or I rather than the Guardian were doing this the consequences would likely be much more drastic. The police would seize all your computers and get a court order to get access to all your offsite backups. In fact this is what happens when people steal data from their employers let alone from the NSA/GCHQ.

In the case of the Guardian it seems like they've gone through this charade as the minimum they can legally do given that the Guardian has told them that copies of the data exist in the US.

I recommend reading this post discussing possible ways for Assange to get out of the Ecuadorian embassy, starting at "So – can he?"

As usual when law (and especially international law) is involved, it is far more complicated than it seems. Also, England isn't really a country - it would be the UK invading Ecuador.

Actually, the law doesn't say that. The law says that if a State wants to use land for diplomatic or consular premises, they can apply to the UK Government. The UK Government can accept or reject their application, and can also revoke the application at a later date.

However, they can only "withdraw consent or withdraw acceptance if [they are] satisfied that to do so is permissible under international law."

So they can't just decide to shut down the embassy at will, they need a reason within the rules of international law. And even then, the Ecuadorians (or Assange) could probably apply for an injunction delaying the effect of withdrawing diplomatic status for as long as it took to challenge the decision in the courts, which could take years.

There are a couple of good articles (by lawyers) on this sort of thing, here and here.

This thread seems to involve a lot of wild speculation about the extent of diplomatic immunity and how it could work for Assange. Fortunately, a UK lawyer and legal blogger has already set out the main options. The discussion of ways to get out of the Ecuadorian embassy begins about a third of the way down.

Having tried a lot of different approaches to writing press releases, we've found that what works best for us in the UK is to issue short press releases like this one within moments of news breaking, and to make one short point, that is sensible, moderate, and very difficult to argue with.

This particular release might not go down so well with the slashdot crowd, but it achieved our objective of getting on to the front page of the BBC news site ( see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17270817 ) with a strong, well argued message that doesn't paint us as alarmist, aggressive, or irrational. We did go on to say "Threats to chuck entire households off the web will be bad for the economy, bad for society - and for us as a creative nation too.", (just as you suggest) but we're always at the mercy of editors who, as I think this proves, often cut out most of what we actually say.

At this early stage in the Party's development, getting press coverage is tough, especially because we're don't fit the preconceptions the press have of loony people with eye patches. This particular story gave us a big headache, the verdict was actually on a fairly small portion of the act that referred to ISP costs, and the question of parts of the Act that should have been notified to the European Commission under the Technical Standards Directive and weren't possibly rendering them unenforceable. The full verdict was likely to be several hundred paragraphs of dense legalese, and crucially, there is usually a delay of several hours between the press reporting the yes/no verdict and any of the court's reasoning being available for us to read.

We've found that waiting for the reasoning means we can put out strong, detailed press releases with point-by-point demolitions of our opponents messages... that don't get picked up on by the press. Simlarly, rants full of venom and references to chilling effects don't go down very well either, partly because the UK doesn't have the same constitutional devotion to free speech that the US does, and therefore 'chilling effect? so what' is usually the public's attitude, but mostly because nobody quotes them except for the Register.

Ideally, I'd love to come up with something like HeadOfLegal's analysis (see http://www.headoflegal.com/2012/03/06/bt-talktalk-v-business-secretary/ ) and get it quoted, but realistically, no mainstream journalist is going to read, digest, summarise and quote something like that in the few minutes they have to get the story online. Print journalism is a different matter, as the deadlines are longer, but we've found that if the BBC website quotes us, then we get interview requests where we can go into more detail.

On this particular story, an appeal on a small part of the bill, followups were actually not that likely if the verdict went against the ISPs. There isn't really much in the verdict that's actually interesting to the general public to be honest. We knew that the press coverage would therefore be vague (hence the understandable impression you got that 'we lost the case' because the damage to the public wasn't highlighted, when it was actually two piracy-neutral ISPs that lost a cost-splitting debate over an obscure point of EC procedure), and that on past form the quotes from the copyright lobbyists would be emotional rants with little basis in reality. If you look at the BBC story from the point of view of a neutral observer, we got a much bigger quote than the pro-copyright lobby did, and we come across as more rational and less scare-mongering. For a bunch of unpaid amateurs taking on the might of the copyright lobby, I think we actually did pretty well this time.