Now On Video: GCHQ Destroying Laptop Full of Snowden Disclosures

An anonymous reader writes "On Saturday 20 July 2013, in the basement of the Guardian's office in Kings Cross, London, watched by two GCHQ technicians, Guardian editors destroyed hard drives and memory cards on which encrypted files leaked by Edward Snowden had been stored. This is the first time footage of the event has been released."

Comments

Such documents trove

[Anonymous Coward]

Such documents trove belongs to ThePirateBay (and everyone of us).

Re:Such documents trove

[tinkerton]

No actually, having a journalistic intermediary that does vetting and filtering is a better approach. One of the -false- accusations against wikileaks was their undiscriminate leaking of classified documents.

Re:Such documents trove

[lagomorpha2]

At the very least they should put up a torrent of the encrypted full document dump as an insurance file against the US/England harassing more journalists or using extraordinary rendition. Glenn Greenwald's partner might not have been detained for 9 hours if there was a chance it would result in the release of all the documents.

Re:Such documents trove

[Applehu Akbar]

So after an extended period of public debate followed by a government raid on the newspaper offices, did anyone actually believe that this small set of computers held the world's only copy of that set of files?

Re:Such documents trove

[cold fjord]

That would solve two problems: the Guardian continuing to publish, and the staff's need for housing.

Re:Such documents trove

[lagomorpha2]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Apparently this guy thinks there are only a couple copies and they need to be physically returned to the NSA so they can be certain that no copies exist anywhere else. Or he's just being more obvious in deliberately implying things that are false than is normal even for someone in his position.

Re:Such documents trove

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, bow down to the journalist caste, trust them to tell us what we need to know!

Re:Such documents trove

[tripleevenfall]

More precisely, there really is no way for a journo to know what is dangerous to disclose and what isn't. The only source that could really tell us that are those who the information would embarrass to begin with.

Re:Such documents trove

[Anonymous Coward]

The Guardian wouldn't post the torrent themselves silly, it would just mysteriously appear one day on thepiratebay initially seeded through TOR.

Re:Such documents trove

[Hal_Porter]

One of the -false- accusations against wikileaks was their undiscriminate leaking of classified documents.

False?

http://download.cabledrum.net/...

Interviewer: "So come on, redactions are going on at the same time, now there is
or isn't a row going on about redaction, I haven't the faintest clue
whether there is or isn't...?

Mr Assange: No, there's no row going on about redactions at all....There was a
group of reports where although they were not really intelligence
informants there were sort of hotline tips...something called threat
reports comprised one in five of the Afghan War Logs and so we held
them back for a line by line redaction...But what we didn't do was
redact one in five lines, putting black marker through it, we just
removed them, and so it looked like we hadn't redacted everything but
in fact we had redacted a fifth of all material, and this permitted an
attack, a political attack, to come from The Times of London.... So The
Times did a proxy war on The Guardian through us by attacking us....
So most of those names were meant to be there, it is right for
them to be published, it is right to publish the names of
politicians, generals bureaucrats, etc, who are involved in this
sort of activity, it is right even to publish the names of corrupt radio
stations in Kabul that were taking SYOPS programme content. It is
also right to publish the names of those people who have been
killed and murdered and who need to be investigated and it is
right to publish the names of all incidental characters who
themselves are not at serious and probable risk of physical harm.
Those incidental characters are someone who owns a company for
example is just involved in shipping operations.... So then there is the
question were there any sort of villagers or so on who gave
information that might lead to reprisals, were there some of those?
Um there were some villagers who - who had given information,
um so that is a regrettable oversight, but it is not our, not merely
our oversight it was the oversight of the United States military
who should've never included that material and who falsely
classified it, and who then made it available to everyone and it
then got out."

Assange never wanted to redact but was forced his media partners. Then he published the full unredacted cables on wikileaks' website. Which they denounced

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

In a joint statement, the Guardian, El Pais, New York Times and Der Spiegel said they "deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk".

And before you mention the password that appeared in David Leigh's book that was supposed to be for a temporary copy of the archive

http://www.theguardian.com/med...

WikiLeaks claimed its disclosure was prompted after conflicts between Assange and former WikiLeaks associates led to one highlighting an error made months before. When passing the documents to the Guardian, Assange created a temporary web server and placed an encrypted file containing the documents on it. The Guardian was led to believe this was a temporary file and the server would be taken offline after a period of hours.

However, former WikiLeaks staff member Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who parted acrimoniously with WikiLeaks, said instead of following standard security precautions and creating a temporary folder, Assange instead re-used WikiLeaks's "master password". This password was then unwittingly placed in the Guardian's book on the embassy cables, which was pu

Re:Such documents trove

[guises]

Your first quote says that Assange did want to redact, and in fact did redact 1/5 of the documents released. It's well known that he was initially in favor of full transparency (no redaction) but was convinced by his media partners that this was a bad plan. This does not mean that they forced him, it's possible for people to change their minds about things when presented with new information or convincing arguments.

I don't follow how the quote about the password is supposed to show anything. Neither Wikileaks nor the Guardian wanted the password to get out, but it did thanks to sloppy handling of security measures. The quote seems to be trying to shift blame for the sloppy security from the Guardian to Wikileaks, but regardless of who was at fault the fact that the documents were released was unintentional.

The final bit: "Assange always wanted to release the unredacted cables because in his mind anyone who cooperated with the US deserves to die." is just slanderous bullshit, and the quote that you give as "evidence" to support it is just an attack editorial by someone who clearly hates Assange.

Re:Such documents trove

[tinkerton]

You're right to point out that Assange wanted to skip the journalist in the middle. I think he did release some documents that way though I'd have to look it up. But the big issues were redacted.

Anyway, I think it was a bad idea. He should have focused on his specialty and stayed out of the journalism business.

Re:Such documents trove

[tinkerton]

That is not the point. The journalist does his/her job and wikileaks does its job: the leaking business. This way each has a responsibility and an accountability and there isn't much to criticize about Wikileaks. Now I think Assange has valid criticism about mainstream journalism but when he starts to take on the journalist's job then he exposes himself and wikileaks to a whole range of criticism , from irresponsible journalism to unguided missile. That's bad policy.

Re:Such documents trove

[Hal_Porter]

What about this

So most of those names were meant to be there, it is right for
them to be published, it is right to publish the names of
politicians, generals bureaucrats, etc, who are involved in this
sort of activity, it is right even to publish the names of corrupt radio
stations in Kabul that were taking SYOPS programme content. It is
also right to publish the names of those people who have been
killed and murdered and who need to be investigated and it is
right to publish the names of all incidental characters who
themselves are not at serious and probable risk of physical harm.
Those incidental characters are someone who owns a company for
example is just involved in shipping operations.... So then there is the
question were there any sort of villagers or so on who gave
information that might lead to reprisals, were there some of those?
Um there were some villagers who - who had given information,
um so that is a regrettable oversight, but it is not our, not merely
our oversight it was the oversight of the United States military
who should've never included that material and who falsely
classified it, and who then made it available to everyone and it
then got out."

Bummer for those "villagers" who opposed the Taliban. Or for anyone who operated a radio station that was pro government and anti Taliban.

So he was in favour of publishing names. And he did too, after a Twitter poll of his followers. Up to that point there was no evidence that Leigh publishing the password had caused the unredacted cables to become generally available.

http://www.theguardian.com/med...

The Guardian book revealed the diplomatic files were placed by WikiLeaks on a secure online server in July 2010, which it was agreed would only be online for a matter of hours.

This server held a heavily encrypted file containing the unredacted embassy cables database. Assange had given Leigh the password to unlock this file once he had obtained it, and this password was included in the book - seven months after the temporary file was taken offline. No trace could be found through web links or Google's archives of this file ever being visible through this secure server.

However, at a later stage the same encrypted file and at least one other encrypted with the same password was posted on the peer-to-peer file-sharing network BitTorrent. One of these files was first published on 7 December 2010, just hours before Assange's arrest. In the days running up to his arrest, Assange had spoken of "taking precautions" in the event of anything untoward happening to him.

This file, it was later discovered, was the same file that had been shared with the Guardian via the secure server. It shared the same file name and file size, and could be unlocked using the same password as that given to Leigh.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former member of staff at WikiLeaks who is attempting to set up a rival whistleblowing website, discovered this republished file and shared information on WikiLeaks's security breach with a small group of journalists.

Avoiding the re-use of passwords and avoiding republishing temporary files are both considered basic security procedures among online security experts.

However, the file was not discovered or downloaded by the public. By 10am on Thursday it had been accessed once in the previous 31 days, despite mounting speculation about its existence.

Initial news stories did not give details of the location of files or of passwords. Later, WikiLeaks and some of its supporters published a series of hints about the passwords and files.

At about 11pm on Wednesday an anonymous Twitter user discovered the published password and opened a separate file - not the one shared with the Guardian - that had also been circulating on file-sharing networks for several m

Re:Such documents trove

[guises]

I don't understand how you can read that quote and see only that. They did redactions, they did leave in a lot of names. Both things. You do redactions to protect the innocent, you leave names in to call out the guilty. Both things are important and they did both things.

They try to discriminate and the quote is saying that they weren't successful in all cases. Then it says that it was not due to merely their oversight, but that of the United States military as well. Maybe he explains what he means by this later on.

This part has nothing to do with the eventual leak of the unredacted documents.

Re:Such documents trove

[AK Marc]

No actually, having a journalistic intermediary that does vetting and filtering is a better approach.

So that it can be targeted for destruction before we get a chance to see it?

Re:Such documents trove

[tinkerton]

If at some point we have a situation that the five mainstream papers that wikileaks has worked with all destroy the data, and no other organisation wants to touch it, then you have a breakdown of the system and you can start thinking about releasing the material after vetting it yourself.

Re:Such documents trove

[AK Marc]

Wen we have the government breaking the law, we already have a breakdown of the system.

Re:Such documents trove

[tinkerton]

Semantics. It hasn't broken down enough to justify going all out.

Re:Such documents trove

[AK Marc]

And you should be the judge of that?

Wasn't this a movie?

[Eyeball97]

Oh, wait... I think it was books they were burning in the movie... Or people... Maybe both...

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[erikkemperman]

Godwin in 6 minutes, well done.

Look, I agree that this is a pretty bad transgression on the part of British government, but let's keep a bit of perspective.

If anything it is slightly comical that these people think they can destroy digital information with drills and grinders and so on. Obviously they really don't, GHCQ do not have a reputation of being digitards.

So this is a message, the presence of cameras confirms it. On the one hand to the assorted press, watch your step. On the other hand to their US counterparts, sorry about this chaps we've got your back.

Which is a dick move, to be sure, but not quite the holocaust yet.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Eyeball97]

Actually I was alluding to common practices going back many centuries, so well done on leaping to conclusions.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody expects the Spanish Godwin.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Sulphur]

There goes the Vol de Mort subscription.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Tom]

If anything it is slightly comical that these people think they can destroy digital information with drills and grinders and so on. Obviously they really don't, GHCQ do not have a reputation of being digitards.

Ignoring the fact that copies exist (and everyone involved knew that), physical destruction is in fact the recommended way to destroy the data on a hard drive, SSD drive, flash memory, etc. etc.

You can overwrite the drive 50 times and you can not be certain that the data is unrecoverable. If you put a grinder to the drive surface, you can be very certain of that.

There's a reason the military shreds harddrives when it disposes of them.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[erikkemperman]

Fair enough. Still, this story hardly warrants the comparison with book burning, certainly not with people burning, IMHO. Also, just curious, which movie were you thinking of?

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[pushing-robot]

This?

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was an attempt to bully the press into submission, pure and simple.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

The files are encrypted, wouldn't that make it much harder to recover after rewriting the storage? Seriously asking, I honestly don't know the answer.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[tftp]

Ignoring the fact that copies exist (and everyone involved knew that), physical destruction is in fact the recommended way to destroy the data on a hard drive, SSD drive, flash memory, etc. etc.

To rephrase: It's relatively easy to ensure that this HDD does not store any data. However it is nearly impossible to ensure that this data is not stored on any HDD.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

it is nearly impossible to ensure that this data is not stored on any HDD.

Destroying the planet will be sufficient, as long as no one has transmitted the data offworld yet.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forcing us to click the link to see what movie you are talking about.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignoring the fact that copies exist (and everyone involved knew that), physical destruction is in fact the recommended way to destroy the data on a hard drive, SSD drive, flash memory, etc. etc.

Translation---- Arrogant to fact, there are several copies of these files. And the GCHQ are complete idiots, and the mere fact they created a video of the destruction was a pathetic attempt at warning British whistle blowers what would happen if you cross the US.

I'm really scared and I'm shaken in my shoes!!!!!

How can this be modded??? Complete destruction of any electronic device, [Hard Drive] ensures no data transferred, when the data originated from another device, or was copied!! You do know you can make several copies of any electronic right?

Sorry for the sarcasm, but this only shows how simple minded /. users have become................

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[noh8rz10]

There should be a f451/Orwell godwin

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[thegarbz]

You can overwrite the drive 50 times and you can not be certain that the data is unrecoverable.

That hasn't been true for about 20 years now. Overwrite your data once and it's gone. Even if you don't overwrite it randomly no data recovery group have been shown to be capable of recovering overwritten data even in the face of great monetary incentive.

There's a reason the military shreds harddrives when it disposes of them.

Yes but it has nothing to do with data possibly being recoverable. It's entirely to do with removing all doubt if a procedure has been applied. If you look at a drive you have no way of knowing if the data has been wiped or if there's anything recoverable on it. If you look at small shards of what's left of a drive then there's no doubt. It doesn't mean that other methods aren't equally secure, just harder to administrate.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Tom]

Seems the allow brain-dead people on this site now. :-)

If you want to reliably destroy the data on one particular storage medium, then physical destruction is the way to go.

This is totally apart from the question of whether or not other copies exist, it's a tangential issue. Funny how everyone except one troll who was intentionally looking for an axe to grind clearly got that meaning.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Tom]

That's a good question. It depends on what the original files were. I'll have to do some extrapolation, since I don't do low-level forensics, so if someone wants to correct me, feel free.

When you run data recovery on an overwritten medium, you are usually able to recover at least parts of the data. Depending on file formats, that may or may not allow you to recover parts of the data.

Imagine, for example, that you are able to recover 80% of the bytes in a file. For a textfile, that pretty much means you have it. Every 5th letter (statistically, of course) will be garbage, but in most cases that is easy to compensate for:

Imag_ne, _or e_ampl_, th_t yo_ are_able_to r_over_ 80%_of t_e byt_s ...

But if you have a compressed file, then those lost bytes often make decompression hard or impossible. That is true for both external compressions (.zip) and internal compressions (as in many image formats). In most cases, you can recover parts of the file, but the chunks missing will be much larger than the 20% of bytes you are missing.

The same goes for encryption, but it depends on which encryption you use. A block cipher, for example, would probably result in the same result as an image file, with individual blocks unrecoverable.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[martin-boundary]

The NSA has backdoors into the major encryption systems, for example in RSA products. So recovery is basically trivial, if you rely on any products sold or provided by Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. Every large US company in fact has too much to lose if they don't cooperate with the NSA, so pick any company where it makes sense for the NSA to put backdoors in. If that company still exists today, then you can conclude that it has a secret deal with the NSA to spy on its customers.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[phantomfive]

Generally when deleted files are able to be recovered, the bytes of the files weren't actually overwritten, they were merely marked as deleted by the filesystem.

Theoretically, when a file has been overwritten with known data, it is possible to use an electron microscope to recover what was there before, but as far as know, no one has been able to actually achieve this. Especially with modern hard drives that are more dense.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can overwrite the drive 50 times and you can not be certain that the data is unrecoverable.

Bullshit. If your drive works fine, even after single (or two, if you are paranoiac) overwrite with random data no-fucking-body in the whole universe will recover anything.

There's a reason the military shreds harddrives when it disposes of them.

But for completely different reasons what you think, its because:
- your drive might be faulty so the overwrite is actually not performed
- could be faster (overwrite of big disk can take hours)
- the destruction can be performed by IT-ignorant, non-technical guy
- the destruction process can be easily CONTROLLED by another non-technical persons.

This last one is actually main reason: in such process there are usually more people involved which "watch each other".
However control of soft (data-only) destruction is very difficult: even if all involved people would be highly technically capable (including your commanding officer), It is difficult to assure that the other guy does not use (intentionally or unintentionally) wrong, hacked or faulty software, does not make copy during overwrite, makes proper control read after the process etc ...

Re: Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

The drives had Windows on them and destroying them was the only way to be sure that it wasn't recoverable.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[AHuxley]

Re attempt at warning British whistle blowers what would happen if you cross the US.
This also happened in Australia with a book chapter on the Iraq and a hard-drive destroyed.
http://www.igis.gov.au/annual_...
"After the sensitive elements were deleted (but only those elements), each concerned person was given the choice of having the copy of their hard-drive (on a
government supplied disk) destroyed in front of them. In some instances this offer was accepted. The purpose of such visible destruction was, I am told, to provide assurance to the person that the government was not retaining any of the information the person had on their computers.
As you will note, the process was managed by the Attorney-General’s Department. That department is not within my jurisdiction."
The option is to be as chilling and direct - in the UK, Australia, the USA now hinting at
"Guardian journalists could face criminal charges over Edward Snowden leaks"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Your slowly seeing the same panicked mind set at the digital level of a 1980's Polish gov with issues they can no longer bribe, jail, control, spin, twist or sock puppet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[hankwang]

Overwrite your data once and it's gone. Even if you don't overwrite it randomly no data recovery group have been shown to be capable of recovering overwritten data

That's if you want the data to be overwritten and you're the owner of the drive. If you want to delete data on someone else's drive, you would have to ensure that the drive does not have some custom firmware installed that messes with the overwriting process...

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[AmiMoJo]

It was actually just Cameron being his usual thick-as-shit self. He requested that the drives be destroyed personally, apparently not realizing or understanding how little effect it would have. In fact it most likely had the opposite effect, ensuring that more material and this kind of negative publicity was put out. He really is a dumb fuck sometimes.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

That hasn't been true for about 20 years now. Overwrite your data once and it's gone.

Unless you have an SSD or anything else with smart firmware and more storage space than advertised. Physical destruction always worked, works currently and will always work in the future and no software/firmware/hardware hack will survive it. Done right it is also a lot quicker to do.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Sique]

You can overwrite the drive 50 times and you can not be certain that the data is unrecoverable.

Actually, this is an old myth, which had some truth to it when hard disk weren't operating at the known physical limits. Then you could actually read some erased information by using a more sensitive magnetic head, which was able to tell the difference between a former one overwritten by zero and a former zero overwritten by zero. But this is no longer so. Any reserves that might have been in the magnetic surface of disk are now used to increase information density. The most sensitive reading heads available are those already built into the hard disks. Overwrite a section of the disk with zeros (or ones, whatever you like), and you can be sure that the information formerly there is safely overwritten.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[purpledinoz]

Why did they have to destroy all the microchips on the motherboard too? It seems like a lot of work for nothing. Plus, who knows how poisonous ground up microchips are.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[maxwell demon]

You can overwrite the drive 50 times and you can not be certain that the data is unrecoverable.

If you can recover the data overwritten 50 times, then you also can recover the data overwritten 49 times (that is, the first set of data you've overwritten the original data with), the data overwritten 48 times (that is, the second set of data you've overwritten it with), the data overwritten 47 times, the data overwritten 46 times ... and you'd have to be able to distinguish between them. which means that on a 500 gigabyte hard disk, you'd be able to recover 25 terabytes of data. I strongly doubt that this is possible.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If anything it is slightly comical that these people think they can destroy digital information with drills and grinders and so on. Obviously they really don't, GHCQ do not have a reputation of being digitards."

No it's not. There have been many professional studies showing that this is a sufficient way to destroy data storage devices. It is even a DoD approved mechanism to destroy digital data. I would get citations but I just woke up and I need coffee

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[retroworks]

Mod up

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shredding is not required. Degaussing and bending the hard drive is sufficient even for classified.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[petermgreen]

But for completely different reasons what you think, its because:
- your drive might be faulty so the overwrite is actually not performed

A related one:

The drive may remap some sectors because they are failing, it may be very difficult to ensure that all the physical sectors are overwritten and not just all the logical sectors.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[jafiwam]

The files are encrypted, wouldn't that make it much harder to recover after rewriting the storage? Seriously asking, I honestly don't know the answer.

My guess it doesn't matter if they were encrypted.

There are copies of the encrypted files. But, as a newspaper, you don't really want third rate spooks breaking into the office trying to steal the hard drive or SD cards.

You don't want run of the mill nerds rifling your dumpster for a piece of history they can sell on eBay.

etc.

By getting most people to think the stuff was destroyed they head off a lot of headaches without really changing anything.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Tom]

You misunderstood "it is not 100% guaranteed to be gone" for "it is 100% guaranteed to be recoverable".

Sure, with each pass you will make some of the data gone for good. But your certainty is a limes function. So no, after x passes you won't be able to recover x * capacity in bytes. But you might be able to recover some of the original data.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Tom]

Bullshit. If your drive works fine, even after single (or two, if you are paranoiac) overwrite with random data no-fucking-body in the whole universe will recover anything.

Partially true, but not entirely.

True, in modern drives we operate very close to the physical limites and overwriting is a lot more destructive than it used to be.

However, there are also so many intermediate layers and internal logic (like the relocation of faulty sectors another commenter pointed out) that you'd have to go very low-level to come even close to any assurance that everything actually has been physically overwritten.

Physical destruction is still the only way to be absolutely certain. All your bullet points also apply.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Tom]

Generally when deleted files are able to be recovered, the bytes of the files weren't actually overwritten, they were merely marked as deleted by the filesystem.

Yes, but since a drive is partitioned into sectors, when you come back to recover the data from that free space, chances are good (depending on drive capacity and activity) that some of those sectors have already been claimed but other files.

I agree my example was misleading. You won't actually be missing every 5th character - you'll be missing large chunks somewhere within the document.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[maxwell demon]

OK, let's say you can get each bit right with 51% probability (rather than 50% as with guessing). Now what do you think is the probability to recover even a single bit from an encrypted file?

Not that I think you'd get even those 51%. Note that you not only have to detect that it was once at that value, you have to detect that it is the value it had exactly 50 rewrites ago, not 49, not 51 (the sector might previously have held other data), but exactly 50 rewrites.

You may convince me that it works for one, two or even three rewrites. But never with 50.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[maxwell demon]

And also it might have reminded some of the journalist handling such data of the importance of backups.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd just like to say thank you very much for your responses Tom & phantomfive. It was informative. :)

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[cold fjord]

Which is a dick move, to be sure, but not quite the holocaust yet.

Saying "not quite the holocaust yet" is a bit of an understatement. And although you would never know it on Slashdot, there is a much more divided opinion in at least some societies about who was actually the "dick" at the heart of it.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[cold fjord]

... no data recovery group have been shown to be capable of recovering overwritten data even in the face of great monetary incentive.

How many of those "data recovery groups" have had the resources of a modern industrialized nation state behind them? The scope of what is possible can vary enormously depending on your resources.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be a f451/Orwell godwin

No, there should be a hammer which bashes your tiny little brains out so they splatter all over the wall.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[mysidia]

So this is a message, the presence of cameras confirms it.

This is a firm message that says: "Stop publishing."

"Another word about Snowden, AND the next supervised immediate destruction order will target all your reporters' computers, All your backoffice servers, All the servers in your web farm, and all your company's backup disks."

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[mysidia]

Ignoring the fact that copies exist (and everyone involved knew that), physical destruction is in fact the recommended way to destroy the data on a hard drive, SSD drive, flash memory, etc. etc.

Grinding the motherboard and CPU, are not ways of destroying data. They're ways of causing a loss of capital, in terms of dollars used to purchase the equipment.

I don't think the authorities' aim so much is to destroy the data, BUT to try to create a financial loss for Snowden and whoever's helping him, in terms of capital dollars spent to purchase those computers and media.

If they publish more and upset the GCHQ again; the Guardian may be forced to destroy other agency assets. This may be a warning shot: "Don't screw with us, or we will come in with a demolition crew and a warrant to seize and demolish all electronics...."

Otherwise, they would kind of care that the news reporting agency has plenty of other copies, and other people have plenty of copies.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[mysidia]

then physical destruction is the way to go.

That makes sense for the hard drives, SSDs, and other magnetic storage medium.

Can you explain the rationale behind physical destruction of the CPU itself, motherboard, and other expensive electronics that cannot actually store any user data?

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[mysidia]

If you look at small shards of what's left of a drive then there's no doubt.

Unless the data's never been overwritten, and then someone pieces a few of those shards back together, for inspection under an electron microscope.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

That hasn't been true for about 20 years now. Overwrite your data once and it's gone.

Physically write 1s and 0s over the old data and it's gone, yes. But can you trust the drive to do that? What if the drive firmware noted some read errors when reading a few blocks, and marked them as bad, copying the data across to some other blocks it was holding in reserve? Then, when you tell it to overwrite the data, it overwrites the new blocks - but the bad blocks still hold a possibly-corrupt, possibly-intact version of the data.

This is certainly a problem for SSDs, which do this sort of intelligent block-reallocation. I don't know how much of an issue it is for HDDs.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[mysidia]

The drive may remap some sectors because they are failing, it may be very difficult to ensure that all the physical sectors are overwritten and not just all the logical sectors.

This is where the SECURE ERAS EUNIT ATA command comes in.

There are only a small number of such replacement 512 byte sectors available. Most drives have not done remapping a significant number of sectors.

The probability that critically sensitive data just so happens to reside in a remapped sector, is scant at best.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[aevan]

Cyberempaths using psychometry.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

then physical destruction is the way to go.

That makes sense for the hard drives, SSDs, and other magnetic storage medium.

Can you explain the rationale behind physical destruction of the CPU itself, motherboard, and other expensive electronics that cannot actually store any user data?

It's all just theater. Only one side of the top platter was ground. The other three sides are still nice and shiny :)

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get me an oscilloscope and wave reduction and one pass can be read still. Two? forgettaboutit.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[LMariachi]

I don’t think Godwin applies to Farenheit 451.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you explain the rationale behind physical destruction of the CPU itself, motherboard, and other expensive electronics that cannot actually store any user data?

CPU? OK, probably a stretch, but they're updatable in terms of microcode. Motherboard? Motherboards store tons of user data. MAC address, the BIOS ROM (or video card's BIOS, etc...) could have been flashed with all sorts of custom data, etc.

Not the entire contents of the archive, but stashing the (crpytographic) keys to the kingdom in a location that has nothing to do with the hard drive would be trivial. There's an insurance policy file floating around out there. It's half a terabyte long. There's no reason to believe that file is anything other than random digits. There's also no reason to belive that it isn't just random digits. There's no reason to believe the key to the insurance policy or any of its components was stored on the laptop, but there's no reason to believe it isn't stored in some hidden persistent storage on the motherboard or subcomponents.

From GCHQ's perspective, the laptop is an untrusted device that has been in the physical control of an adversary. If you don't know what's on it, but you do know that you want whatever's on it to be gone, you make sure that all of it is gone. They simply must assume the worst-case scenario. GCHQ may have only destroyed one copy of the data, but they destroyed that copy correctly.

Destroying the data in such a way that a journalist cannot recover it is insufficient: GCHQ must also destroy the data in such a way that real spies (nation-state level actors with resources comparable to their own) who get their hands on the components are also unable to recover it.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Hal_Porter]

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.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Tom]

Now what do you think is the probability to recover even a single bit from an encrypted file?

That depends on the encryption.

In very simple terms: Some encryption methods work so that if you have one hole or wrong byte anywhere, all the rest of the file is garbage. But some other encryption methods work in blocks, so if you have an error, then that block is garbage, but the next block can be decrypted normally.

You may convince me that it works for one, two or even three rewrites. But never with 50.

For all practical purposes, even if you've done only two or three passes, the data is probably gone.

But if you want to make sure, then that's not enough. If you want to make "reasonably sure", then overwriting a few times is good enough. If you want to make really, really, sure with absolute certainty, then physically destroying the device is what you're going to do. Not because there's any practical probability left otherwise, but because you don't want to make the Alien mistake. You definitely do want to take off and nuke the site from orbit, just to be sure.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[jcrb]

No you misunderstand the nature of recovering data from a HDD. It s not that the data from the 49th overwrite could be recovered, it is that the data from the 1st write might be recoverable. How is it that the data from the 1st write could be recovered but the data from the most recent couldn't be? Because if the 1st write sits for a long time then 1 that was written to the drive when over written by a 0 becomes not a 0 but a 0.1 or the 0 overwritten by a 1 becomes a 0.9 not a 1. so while the drive itself is not going to be able to recover anything if you just write 0's to the whole drive, someone with better equipment that is prepared to read the drive over and over may be able to sift out the 0's and the 0.1's as if they were 0's and 1's. So by randomly writing 0s and 1s back and forth you give all the bits a randomized amount of magnetism and make it unrecoverable.

So if the disk had one set of data stored on it for an extended period of time and then you wrote a new set of data there would be a period of time where you could 0 the drive and potentially recover the first set of data, so at most you could say the drive contains somewhat less than 2X its rated capacity, with great difficulty.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[ImprovOmega]

Except that if just one byte of any given block is unrecoverable the entire block is unrecoverable. Even 95% would be insufficient to have much statistical chance of recovering a single block of real data. And that is assuming the encryption is 100% trivial to reverse for the NSA or whoever is trying to break into it.

Re: Wasn't this a movie?

[DigiShaman]

Keep in mind that 'writes' are already dirty on a new and fully functional drive. Serious error correction schemes are fully factored in due to drive density when engineering these units. I forgot what the percentage is, but the amount of bits used in error correction alone is substantial. That all said, a simple zero-write overpass is all that's required nowadays. And just to be sure that an entire nation state can't get to the data, drop it into magma or some crucible of molten metal. Not that it's needed, just peace of mind for the truly paranoid.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Mashiki]

Well you've been on /. a long time, so you should remember that story that got published here back about 6 years ago where they found it really didn't matter. A single rewrite is usually enough to destroy everything, including anything that may have been done through relocation of faults.

Anything else is extra insurance, but single writes are enough.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[chihowa]

What's the physical mechanism for that? Magnetic media stores information as the reorientation of magnetic domains on the disc. There's no physical reason why magnetic orientation sitting for longer would be more persistent than that which is changed quickly. The field created by the write coil is roughly the same during the first write as the 50th write and the polarizability of the domains doesn't change much with time. There's nothing special about the first write.

If anything, data that sits on the disk for a long time is more easily overwritten because of bitrot (cosmic rays, thermal homoginization of the domains, etc). As the drive sits, the individual magnetic domains are less likely to be a uniform chuck of similar magnetic orientation.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Tom]

Actually, I don't remember that particular story. I do, however, remember that maybe 8 or 9 years ago, there were companies still in business offering such recovery services. Don't remember the details, though. Might have depended on the age and type of drive even then.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[wiredlogic]

That hasn't been true for about 20 years now. Overwrite your data once and it's gone.

Actually it still is true. While it is nigh impossible to recover overwritten sectors in modern GMR drives, they all have remapping facilities to deal with failing sectors. You cannot overwrite marginal sectors that were previously remapped by the drive firmware. Those sectors could still be read back by three-letter organizations with the budget to buy the necessary equipment and insider knowledge. Physical destruction is the only guarantee that nothing can be recovered.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is the perfect solution for a politician or bureaucrat:

1) I have done SOMETHING.

2) The results of what I've done are visible and "photogenic", i.e., the little bag of ground-up bits distract the gullible

3) Look at ME as the SOMETHING I did is made public and makes us all (safer, healthier, free-er, ever so much more so of whatever it is we want, etc., etc.)!

4 out of 5 stars for the politician; especially given that this is a complete joke to the politician (who likely knows better, or has advisors that do) and to the tech-savvy world who understand the distinction between data and data devices.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh, sorry, Squire; I seem to have dropped your entire SAN array down the service stairway. Pity, that; seems to have been quite large...

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

I found this surprisingly easy to masturbate to.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[HiThere]

That wouldn't work...well, it conceivably COULD, but currently all data stored to a drive is "encrypted" to compact the storage, so you probably need to piece together an entire sector in order to recover any of it. And IIUC different disks have different sizes of sectors, so you need to know how the disk was formatted to know how much you need to piece together.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly BRILLIANT.

Brb, cleaning beer off monitor....

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[thegarbz]

And remapping is a tiny TINY percentage of the data on the drive, not to mention that it is doubtful that data will be recoverable anyway, remember there was a reason the data was remapped in the first place?

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[thegarbz]

The scope can only vary if the solution is something you can throw money at. I.e. encryption. There's a big difference in breaking encryption if you have the finances to build a supercomputer. However when scanning electron microscopes can't be used to recover the data, what more expensive technology do you suppose the NSA has that would help them? A time machine?

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[cold fjord]

A time machine?

That must be it. (Maybe I shouldn't have said anything.)

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[noh8rz10]

whose brains?

Re: Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

National security theater

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[TangoMargarine]

Well if you want to be really REALLY sure, you'd encase the destroyed drives in concrete, drop them in an active supervolcano, and push the planet into the sun, but...

Unless you're dealing with crazy wear leveling, I think 50 times (random bits) over the entire drive is going to be unrecoverable. Period.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[TangoMargarine]

I think the unstated argument here is that you don't need the extra 0.0001% certainty that physically destroying the device grants you. Hard drives use rare elements that we really shouldn't just be throwing away at this point.

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you be willing to elaborate a little on "so many intermediate layers and internal logic"? I'm a bit fascinated by data forensics but had read an article previously that convinced me that 0-filled data was irretrievable in practice, and I assumed that was the only relevant thing. Now I'm seeing a need to research if DBAN actually does anything to 0-fill relocated/faulty sectors, but I'm also wondering what other things you're eluding to that I might check into?

Re:Wasn't this a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

With the current state of the art we could probably, if very lucky, recover up to 1% of the data on a disk by spending several hundred hours doing a complete electron or STM micrograph of the surface then spending some large number (thousands or more) more hours separating the track data from the overwritten areas (assuming zeros or ones). All this effort to get probably one or two tracks worth from an entire terabyte disk is a pretty poor investment of time if you don't know exactly what you're looking for and are sure it was on the drive. If you overwrite with random or even pseudorandom data then good bloody luck. As you say the days when Peter Gutmann could read MFM and RLE drives with an oscilloscope and subtractive analysis of the head data are long gone.

No more bombshells?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the end of the leaks then? No smoking gun?

Re:No more bombshells?

[viperidaenz]

Not from that particular copy of the data.

Re:No more bombshells?

[erikkemperman]

Is this the end of the leaks then? No smoking gun?

No, just a bunch of smoking HDs. But seriously, a "smoking gun" is what you need in a case where the evidence is thus far not conclusive. In this case, however, I don't know of anything Snowden released which has been denied by officials and much of it has been confirmed or corroborated by others.

Re:No more bombshells?

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically No 10 Downing Street are morons.

This Week on Masterpiece Theater

[Anonymous Coward]

Great another show for America to copy from the UK. You know the American version will be totally lame

Re:This Week on Masterpiece Theater

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

At least the US version will explain that GCHQ means "Government Communications Headquarters" i.e.: the Brit version (SIGINT) of the NSA. Also, guaranteed no boobies, so win/win.

Re:This Week on Masterpiece Theater

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that equally true when our shows are 'copied' over there, like Law & Order?

Re:This Week on Masterpiece Theater

[Mister Transistor]

Yeah, but at least it won't be starring fucking Ricky Gervais!

Re:This Week on Masterpiece Theater

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the US version of 'the office' more (the UK version is just so depressing), i like US version of 'life on mars' more than the UK version.

Re:This Week on Masterpiece Theater

[Anonymous Coward]

Even with that seriously lame ending? Couldn't even get that right, it was just a stupid fucking pun.

Re:This Week on Masterpiece Theater

[noh8rz10]

At least the US version will explain that GCHQ means "Government Communications Headquarters" i.e.: the Brit version (SIGINT) of the NSA. Also, guaranteed no boobies, so win/win.

I don't understand your comment, and how you are applying your sarcasm. Are you saying guaranteed boobies are a bit win or aren't a big win? Because I think they are a big win.

What about the copies?

[turrican]

I'm sure those are locked away safely.

Re:What about the copies?

[bob_super]

Nope, through computum entanglement, destroying the south bridge of the PC which had held the hard drive also destroyed all the copies.
Quantum mechanics is a bit too complex for us peons, just trust the govt on this one.

Re:What about the copies?

[Immerman]

In fact they claim it was made completely clear to the head honcho ordering the destruction that other copies did in fact exist and that this display would not change anything. It was purely a PR/attempted intimidation stunt.

Re:What about the copies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, it worked.

Captcha: unionize

Re:What about the copies?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

What about good old paper copies? I hope that one of the curators actually prints all the documents out, and squirrels them away in the closed archive stacks of an obscure library somewhere. The problem with storing all the documents on hard drives makes them easier to destroy . . . one hard drive in the shredder, and you're done. Having them as paper copies might make it more difficult for the spooks to trace and destroy.

Of course, the curators will probably have to go hardcore with this. Multiple folks will need to read and memorize individual documents, so copies will be on human data storage devices. However, this will be risky for the individuals involved. The spooks will upgrade from paper shredders to wood chippers . . . they are big enough to turn a human into garden mulch.

Re:What about the copies?

[maxwell demon]

You misunderstood. Yes, they were using quantum mechanics, but in a different way: They triggered a doomsday device which would destroy the earth in case any copy of the documents still existed, thus effectively performing a global quantum suicide. By doing so, they ensured that all documents were destroyed.

Re:What about the copies?

[maxwell demon]

Having them as paper copies might make it more difficult for the spooks to trace and destroy.

Why? Just hold a burning match on the paper and let the fire do its work. It will spread to all the documents, for sure.

Re:What about the copies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which The Guardian now chooses to publish, 6 months later.

Saving face?

[txoof]

What the hell was that? They threatened to shut down the Guardian if the media wasn't handed over; it appears though that they didn't have the balls to go through with the threat. Instead they came up with this bizarre compromise that involved 'destroying' the data. Why do this? Was it just a way for the government to save face and not have to back down from some crazy ass redline that threw out there? They must know that the files were immediately duplicated and spread around the world. That was by far one of the strangest things I've ever seen a newspaper do.

Re:Saving face?

[_Shad0w_]

I suspect The Guardian was mostly thinking "Sure, we'll play along with your little pantomime. It's not like it's actually going to make any difference." I suspect the technicians from GCHQ were thinking the same as well. Possibly with a side thought of "Well, it gets us out of Cheltenham for a day at least".

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to people who don't understand technology and are given control over people who do.

The files weren't destroyed, even one the platens the data can still be recovered that's not to mention the fact the files are freely available to anyone who wants to view them outside of the controls of those who think they have a monopoly on information.

The only way I can see this is show-boating, A display of power which says "Free speech" Is nothing, we control what you say and if you disagree we will smash your hardware too.

Wake Up USA! this is what happened before the rise of the Third Reich.

Re:Saving face?

[atomicxblue]

If I were them, I'd call their bluff... I'm sure it would be a major backlash worldwide because it would be seen as censoring what the press could report.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume they actually went into Windows and deleted the files first.

Re:Saving face?

[Mister Transistor]

It is to lose; all the gov't needs to do is recite those magic words "National Security", and they can do pretty much whatever they want. Who can stop them?

Re:Saving face?

[DaHat]

More broadly, the UK lacks the same (or comparable) legal protections of the press & free speech that the US has via our First Amendment.

Re:Saving face?

[Tom]

I'm so tired of hearing that.

The laws are different over here in Europe, yes. But bland statements like the above just make me cringe. Some rights are stronger in the US, some are stronger in Europe, and it even differs by country.

And then there's the law on the one hand and enforcement on the other. The NSA didn't exactly get much opposition from Google, Microsoft and everyone else they've tapped into, did they? That's not new or "post 9/11", either. If you read up on the history of the NSA, you'll find that in the early days they went to the telegraph companies and without a court order they got copies of every telegraph message leaving or entering the USA.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between Europe and the US *is* important though. You'll note that the US government has not dared to even suggest censoring the New York Post.

Re:Saving face?

[BlueStrat]

Who can stop them?

Me.

You.

All of us together.

If they kill all of us, they won't have anyone to make their tea.

Strat

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given its history, I think of the US Constitution as more a statement of good intent than any sort of iron clad protection or inalienable rights.

I mean, pretty well EVERY time the US has been stressed (by war, by politics, by circumstances) the Constitution and its amendments have been set aside, only for the Supreme Court or whatever to revisit the situation 10 or 20 years down the track (long after the damage has been done) to reinstate said rights and privileges ... after which everybody apologizes to those so affected, and the next breach of the Constitution occurs.

The point is that unless such laws are rigorously enforced (and if they were Edward Snowden would be immune from prosecution, the Nisei would never have been imprisoned, McCarthyisim wouldn't have been able to conduct its witchhunts, and hundreds of other breaches of th Constitution wouldn't have occurred over the last 2 centuries), and unless the US Court system is immune to political and social realities and enforces the Constitution literally, dogmatically and as a semantic problem ... then these breaches will regularly occur, the rights of US individuals will regularly be trampled on (as is the case with the CONTINUING NSA breaches) and the Constitution will essentially mrerley be a statement of good intent.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll note that the US government has not dared to even suggest censoring the New York Post.

Whist you will notice that the UK government has not dared to suggest that reading the newspaper might cause you to lose your security clearance. Both equally stupid.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they kill all of us, they won't have anyone to make their tea.

Now that's funny right there.

Re:Saving face?

[Tom]

Just as the laws differ, so do the horrible things the government does. Yeah, the GCHQ went to the Guardian to get a computer destroyed. Meanwhile, Obama will have you killed by a drone. And while there is armed military at London's airports, they don't have a TSA.

Really want to continue comparisons?

Re:Saving face?

[noh8rz10]

The problem is that the constitution is upheld by the supreme court, who only have the power to review actions once they've already occurred. So there can't be any constitutional violations to find until after the constitution has been violated! The only other solution is minority report.

Re:Saving face?

[_Shad0w_]

There are very rarely armed military personnel at UK airports. Them being there is highly unusual and worthy of comment. The uniformed armed people you usually see at UK airports are regular armed police. Although that itself is unusual in a national context (though not at airports); our police aren't routinely armed (it's in fact a specialization you have to qualify for).

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell was that? They threatened to shut down the Guardian if the media wasn't handed over; it appears though that they didn't have the balls to go through with the threat. Instead they came up with this bizarre compromise that involved 'destroying' the data. Why do this? Was it just a way for the government to save face and not have to back down from some crazy ass redline that threw out there? They must know that the files were immediately duplicated and spread around the world.

That was by far one of the strangest things I've ever seen a newspaper do.

Yet again it seems I'm the only one who's not ignorant. Now, you need to look at this from the government's perspective:

First, the physical files were a political bargaining chip, yes ridiculous to use against media, but one must play every trick at one's disposal.

Secondly, we know how things like truecrypt or unpartitioned drive space work. The data you can see from the OS may not be all the data there is. Destroying the hardware is the only way to be sure that they don't get a message from Snowden or someone who handled the files, or their deadman-switch saying, "Mount the drive space at LBA34 to 1023 as a FAT16 partition using this truecrypt key to access more unredacted / undisclosed files..." Even if you delete a file with a "file shredder" program it could still be there if the drive decided to swap that sector out for a spare. Standard (moronic) sector alignment strategies employed by OSs sometimes leave kilobytes, whole "tracks", or even close to a megabyte of free space (moronic because LBA has been virtualized by drives since the 90's, hell, all versions of DOS and Windows up to 95 had an error where they couldn't use all 1024 heads, so BIOS wrapped the read/write call and modified CHS mapping on the fly -- All you DBA's thinking "track alignment" was important have been fucking wrong since you started doing it). Not saying that anyone found a particularly heinous bit of data and squirrelled it away thus, or that they wouldn't have other avenues for copying / hiding the file, but if you're the government why take a chance just in case its the last place you didn't destroy that screws you.

Lastly, if you've been keeping up with the capabilities that the NSA and likely the GCHQ have regarding malware, esp. firmware malware, you might not sound so ridiculous when assuming that there was no data in those systems that neither the Guardian didn't know about, and that the spy agencies have a vested interest in not having discovered. Think about it: That's the first thing you'd do as a government spy agency some data leaked, eh? You'd try to infect the target system and exfiltrate the files to see exactly what your "enemy" knows. It might not be a huge deal now, but if forensic tear-down of the system discovered the spy agencies had their fingers in the media outlet's firmware then that would be more bad PR and also tip their hand that they knew what all the disclosures would be, and could start working towards pre-emptively disclosing some things... gee, just like the world's spy agencies have done since, eh?

I swear, you're doomed. You can lead a mind to information, but you can't make it think.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many other ways to achieve that goal.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

You (not you specifically) keep saying that, but you never do anything.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you haven't heard it enough apparently so I'm going to repeat it for you: America has way better protection for the press and general freedom of expression than Europe and the UK in particular.

There is a reason why the Obama administration denied the request from the UK to legally pursue The Guardian's US counterparts - the reason is that we Americans have much more robust press protections than you guys do.

Either admit it or continue to stick your head in the sand.

Re:Saving face?

[ultranova]

All of us together.

Which requires communication. Which is why NSA and its ilk are so hell-bent on wiretapping everything: to ensure any rebellion is crushed in the bud. Which, in turn, gives various governments ever greater assurance that they'll face no opposition no matter what they do, thus encouraging them to go farther.

It's a nasty vicious circle which could easily end up in another age of tyranny. It's why things like Tor and Freenet are so important: anonymous communication is the only way to organize effective resistance before things get so bad that lots of people are willing to risk death to fight, which in turn is the only way to keep things from getting that bad.

Of course, effective resistance also requires people to recognize a "divide and conquer" strategy when it's used against them. Which is why those in power are wish to discredit the concept of "class war": to keep the oppressed from having a group identity different from the oppressors. There is actually a class war going on, and has been for a while. The current economic troubles are part of the collateral damage, caused by the massive increase in debt caused by the concentration of wealth, and it will only get worse from here if the lower classed don't start fighting back effectively rather than dreaming futile dreams of winning the lottery and joining the 1%.

Re:Saving face?

[swillden]

The NSA didn't exactly get much opposition from Google, Microsoft and everyone else they've tapped into, did they?

I think the NSA got considerable opposition from Google, and knew from the beginning that it would, which is why Google was (per David Drummond) never even asked to provide broad access to user data. The revelation that the NSA might be tapping connections between data centers caused a crash project to make sure all of that traffic was encrypted, for example. In general, this stuff has really pissed Googlers off and Google engineers are working to plug every potential leak they can find.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but don't speak for Google.)

Re:Saving face?

[swillden]

Well you haven't heard it enough apparently so I'm going to repeat it for you: America has way better protection for the press and general freedom of expression than Europe and the UK in particular.

And yet, both Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders rate the UK higher than the US with respect to freedom of the press. On paper the US has strong constitutional protection for the press. In practice, we're happy to ignore the constitution whenever it's inconvenient, and analysis of the actual treatment of the press demonstrates that.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect The Guardian was mostly thinking "Sure, we'll play along with your little pantomime. It's not like it's actually going to make any difference." I suspect the technicians from GCHQ were thinking the same as well. Possibly with a side thought of "Well, it gets us out of Cheltenham for a day at least".

It made for a 'news bite' about 'how serious GCHQ is' about keeping the data from being distributed.

Of course, it was a pointless gesture... but 95% of the people watching the news have no idea they're just being brainwashed by the propaganda machine.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the solution is to vote in an executive which actually enforces the constitution and a legislature that doesn't create laws which ignore the constitution. Continuing to vote D or R is not much divorced from continuing to voice support for Penn State after it was revealed the staff was shielding Sandusky.

Re:Saving face?

[rueger]

Then again, the US is unique is having thousands of over the air radio and television stations living in mortal fear of anyone, anywhere saying "fuck" on the air for fear of massive fines from the FCC.

You do realize that the rest of the western world kind of snickers whenever you do some dumb-ass thing like freak out over the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction?"

Re:Saving face?

[Areyoukiddingme]

The current economic troubles are part of the collateral damage, caused by the massive increase in debt caused by the concentration of wealth, and it will only get worse from here if the lower classed don't start fighting back effectively rather than dreaming futile dreams of winning the lottery and joining the 1%.

Most of us are too good at math to fall for the lottery false hope.

Instead, most of us think we can lift ourselves up by our bootstraps. Most of us think we're so smart that we can invent the Next Big Thing. Most of us think we can get rich through intelligently applied hard work. Most of us think that being smart and determined is all you need. Most of us are wrong. Most of us haven't noticed that the odds of achieving financial independence by that route are no better than the odds of achieving it via the lottery.

Most of us are worse at math than we think we are.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

No one cares enough for what you describe, remember, the British have never had the mental capability or the balls for a revolution, and one isn't about to start now...

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they kill us all, they've killed us all. And they won't care. And the few that remain will either vote as directed or, as they do now, not vote.

Ghandi pointed out that his non-violent civil resistance would fail in the face of a truly fascist regime who would just round up the protesters and send them to the glue factory.

Abbie Hoffman's suicide note was short and to the point: ""It's too late. We can't win, they've gotten too powerful."

"Lone Wolf" protesters can still cause lots of trouble, like flooding telecom channels, making the gov't waste lots of time on phone calls between nobody and no one else where the line is left open for hours of gabbling 3 year olds. Think up fun ways to subvert the idiocy on your own. Just be ready for the boot to come down on you, and take comfort when it does that you aren't the first, won't be the last, and aren't alone.

Re:Saving face?

[Anonymous Coward]

In one sense, you're wrong and have missed the most important (if bleak) reality: MOST of us are resigned to our lives of wage slavery, simply hoping to remain connected to some corporate teat long enough to educate our children and retire.

Sad, really.

captcha: automata (not kidding)

Motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

They just looked like idiots, destroying not only HDs but also... motherboards! do the really think there will be confidental information stored in motherboards?

Re:Motherboards

[Mister Transistor]

It's just a stupid as the US response taking out and replacing every part of every computer and network that Snowden accessed.

I mean, really - the CAT-5? Come on. Just a stupid excuse for work and so that they can claim "Oh he did millions of $$ damages, see we had to replace everything including a new coat of paint on the data center".

Absolute tripe.

Re:Motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

But...but... looks like they made sure the cooling fans were destroyed too.... one never knows the data that can reside on those fan coils!!!

Re:Motherboards

[Tom]

It's just a stupid as the US response taking out and replacing every part of every computer and network that Snowden accessed.

Disagree. No matter what you think of the NSA, in the whole circus they are one of the few people who actually know their stuff. These guys are scary good at what they do. If I had to clean up a place that was bugged by the NSA, I'd do the same - rip out everything and replace it.

You can buy keyloggers that fit into a USB plug these days. I'm pretty sure the NSA has stuff like Ethernet monitors that fit into slightly-larger-than-usual CAT-5 plugs. And if you consider the size of Raspberry Pi, you'll realize that you can fit a whole second computer into the case of another computer.

When your server gets rooted by a hacker, every security professional worth his money will tell you to wipe it and do a complete reinstall. There is no way to clean up the system without that where you can be certain that there's not a backdoor left somewhere you didn't look.

This is the same, just in hardware.

Re:Motherboards

[FlyHelicopters]

When your server gets rooted by a hacker, every security professional worth his money will tell you to wipe it and do a complete reinstall. There is no way to clean up the system without that where you can be certain that there's not a backdoor left somewhere you didn't look.

Depending on the nature of the server, I'd be tempted to replace the hardware as well and shred the old stuff as well.

Formatting a hard drive doesn't really remove everything, even a "secure" erase isn't the same thing as simply buying a new one.

Re:Motherboards

[deconfliction]

When your server gets rooted by a hacker, every security professional worth his money will tell you to wipe it and do a complete reinstall. There is no way to clean up the system without that where you can be certain that there's not a backdoor left somewhere you didn't look.

Those were the good ol' days. These days everybody knows there are half a dozen backdoors in the various firmwares that even an OS wipe won't get. (disk, network, bios, etc)

Re:Motherboards

[edjs]

If I had to clean up a place that was bugged by the NSA, I'd do the same - rip out everything and replace it.

I'd be tempted to torch the place for the insurance money and move.

Re:Motherboards

[dcollins117]

Disagree. No matter what you think of the NSA, in the whole circus they are one of the few people who actually know their stuff.

If that were true, Snowden wouldn't have been able to access and distribute the sensitive security documents he did and we wouldn't be talking about this at all. Doesn't seem they are particularly competent with regards to security to me.

Re:Motherboards

[jones_supa]

I suppose you could use the fan tachometer wire to read some arbitrary data stored on that fan.

Re:Motherboards

[Tom]

competent != perfect

If you run an organisation of this size, you have security holes, period. There is no such thing as perfect security, and everyone knows it (though some snake-oil sellers pretend otherwise).

Re:Motherboards

[phantomfive]

These guys are scary good at what they do. If I had to clean up a place that was bugged by the NSA, I'd do the same - rip out everything and replace it.

And dig up the foundation.

Re:Motherboards

[Tom]

That, as well as the other comment much to the same, is very true.

However, it depends on your threat scenario. If you are the victim of a regular hack, i.e. someone gained entry over the network, then you know your hardware is unchanged, so you can keep it. That is the scenario I was referring to. If, of course, someone physically broke into your server room, you should mistrust your hardware unless you know exactly what they did and didn't do (say you have a video that you know was not tampered with).

I don't think much of Microsoft as anyone who's been following me on /. knows, but they have a good set of rules which includes "If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore".

Re:Motherboards

[_Shad0w_]

Yes he would, because his job and vetting level allowed him unsupervised access to materials at that level of protection. The flaw in their system was either their vetting - I have no idea if there was anything in Snowden's past that should have given them a reason to consider him unreliable - or that his access was unsupervised.

The problem with requiring supervised access to materials or infrastructure you (potentially) routinely access as part of your job is you've just doubled (at least) the number of people you need to do anything. Basically any system of security is going to require that at some point you have to trust people, otherwise the entire system becomes an unworkable nightmare and no-one can get anything done.

Re:Motherboards

[zdzichu]

NSA certainly bugs ethernet sockets – see http://images.dailytech.com/ni... .
The amount of destruction on motherboard teaches us a thing: GCHQ destroyed elements they KNOW could be used for storing data/snooping. So we say ”morons”, but they actually are ahead of us in spying. And they expect other intelligences to have similar capacities as NSA/GCHQ.

Re:Motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA failed at basic information security. There are plenty of corporate IT departments that have more robust information security than the NSA it would seem.

Nobody should be allowed to transfer that much data without setting off an alarm. Nobody should be allowed to take home laptops and removable media from a secure facility. There should be a robust audit trail and a clear separation of duties even between sysadmins.

There is nothing in Snowden's background that was missed otherwise we would have heard about it. The government got snowed.

Re:Motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't teach us that. The southbridge chips don't store anything. If you're trying to tell us that the southbridges could have been bugged or replaced, then that should apply to every other chip on the motherboard that wasn't destroyed.

Morons or not this entire affair was pure theater.

Re:Motherboards

[maxwell demon]

You could in principle re-flash the BIOS to hold small amounts of confidential data (or more likely, decryption keys for confidential data).

Re:Motherboards

[maxwell demon]

Well, given that it was the Guardian destroying the computers under oversight of GCHQ, and they knew it was filmed, I can imagine them fulfilling the order ridiculously to the letter, to make the stupidity of it obvious without the GCHQ being able to complain.

Re:Motherboards

[Tom]

The NSA failed at basic information security. There are plenty of corporate IT departments that have more robust information security than the NSA it would seem.

I didn't think I'd use that abbreviation ever again, but: ROTFLMAO

Most corporate IT security is a joke. There's a reason the security consulting business is thriving, and it's that when they get called in, they always find yet another problem. What corporate IT is good at is creating bullshit rules that placate management types and don't add any actual security. Yes, I'm looking at you, SOX. And don't get me wrong, I worked as the Senior Manager IT Compliance for a fairly big company. It was a lot of fun, but most of what SOX adds is so basic in security that its main benefit is in revealing just how horrible the IT security in most corporations sucks.

Everyone has security problems, and the NSA is not special. But claiming that corporations are better is just ridiculous given that a lot of my friends regularily walk out of corporate headquarters with their biggest secrets in their hands when they conduct pentests or social engineering tests.

Re:Motherboards

[mysidia]

When your server gets rooted by a hacker, every security professional worth his money will tell you to wipe it and do a complete reinstall.

And then get countermanded/overridden by the server or workstation technician or management, because wiping and reinstalling is too time consuming and/or expensive. Just get some antivirus and security scanners software setup, clean out all the malware, and resecure it, so the system works again.

"We won't tolerate laziness from you security folks. You have to do your job and make sure the system is clean in a timely way. No you cannot make the user reinstall their Windows 7. No to revoking admin rights... all our employees have to have admin rights to their workstations, so they can install software, as the need arises..."

Re:Motherboards

[mysidia]

If you do a wipe and restore of the OS from backup, from a date you can verifiably show was before the compromise; AND repair the security holes and vulnerabilities, and make sure to change all security credentials -- passwords, etc, , before reconnecting to the internet.

Then after so restoring... the biggest things you actually should worry about are.... (1) Something else on your network may likewise be compromised, such as other servers or networking infrastructure - especially anything Telnet is used to manage, anything managed from the server or having shared credentials, OR whose credentials were used on or through the server --- during the compromise, the hacker may have sniffed credentials, logged keystrokes entered by admins via RDP or SSH, or the hacker may have covertly pivoted through the broken system to quietly compromise or place undetectable covert backdoors in other systems; (3) You didn't actually close the bug used to compromise, due to complete info, OR (4) There is yet another similar bug, that the persistent attacker, or another attacker will find..... and undo all that repair work seconds after the system is back up.

Those were the good ol' days. These days everybody knows there are half a dozen backdoors in the various firmwares that even an OS wipe won't get. (disk, network, bios, etc)

Hogwash. While it is true that such backdoors can created, and nation-states may have had backdoor tampering installed in the server, first -- it is not shown to be used, and firmware based attacks are also hard because they are hardware-specific, AND computer hardware varies widely. FOR NOW, you still do not need to worry about system firmwares. There are scant if any significant cases, where firmware backdoors have been leveraged by hackers.

I see post-compromise firmware backdoors firmly on my security radar, but it's not really a major threat or risk yet.

It's kind of like talking about ARP-injection based sniffing malware. It's certainly possible, but the bad guys have not reached that level of tooling or technological enablement just yet.

Re:Motherboards

[mysidia]

I'd be tempted to torch the place for the insurance money and move.

Which would play right into the NSA's hands, as you move on from your torched building, and agents quietly recover some fireproof surveillance blackbox units which had been dropped down various walls, that your torching made retrieval a simple task.

Re:Motherboards

[mysidia]

There is no such thing as perfect security, and everyone knows it

This is why the notion "It is OKAY if we have all these backdoors and all this data collection, the only quantum computer, etc, as long as it is controlled by strong security controls, laws, regulations, oversight" is absurd.

" there is no privacy threat in collecting massive amounts of information — if access to that information is rigidly controlled and minimalized."

...

The NSA feels that if people knew about these controls, they’d be OK with the collection. This argument reminded me of something I learned from my approved NSA source in the 1990s. The official who concocted the Clipper Chip scheme had a vision where private citizens could use encryption. But the NSA, though its built-in backdoor chip, would be able to access the information when it needed to. The official called his vision “Nirvana.” The NSA is still envisioning Nirvana ...

Re:Motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

Hogwash. While it is true that such backdoors can created, and nation-states may have had backdoor tampering installed in the server, first -- it is not shown to be used, and firmware based attacks are also hard because they are hardware-specific, AND computer hardware varies widely. FOR NOW, you still do not need to worry about system firmwares. There are scant if any significant cases, where firmware backdoors have been leveraged by hackers.

I see post-compromise firmware backdoors firmly on my security radar, but it's not really a major threat or risk yet.

It's kind of like talking about ARP-injection based sniffing malware. It's certainly possible, but the bad guys have not reached that level of tooling or technological enablement just yet.

You obviously haven't been paying attention lately.

Re:Motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing GCHQ overlooks is the Sheva Plug in the furnace room marked
"CO2 Sensor. Do Not Remove"

Captcha: augment

Re:Motherboards

[Tom]

This is why the notion "It is OKAY if we have all these backdoors and all this data collection, the only quantum computer, etc, as long as it is controlled by strong security controls, laws, regulations, oversight" is absurd.

Oh, I agree completely. But don't forget that, like any big organisation, what the NSA actually thinks internally and what it says in public statements are two very different things and in many cases there is very little connection between the two.

Re:Motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

>that your torching made retrieval a simple task

No, you think like an amateur.

The kind of fire we're talking about is driven by large quantities of cleverly-placed, home-built thermite and a lot of accelerant. Several thousand degrees F EVERYWHERE won't leave much of anything for anybody to play with.

Just play nice and leave a call at the local fire brigade explaining in detail why they should just stand back, save the surrounding buildings from ignition, and let this one go. Or, if you weren't an amateur to begin with, the EXTREMELY REMOTE building from which you worked could be treated the same way with much less fuss and potential "collateral damage".

Re:Motherboards

[deconfliction]

That, as well as the other comment much to the same, is very true.

However, it depends on your threat scenario. If you are the victim of a regular hack, i.e. someone gained entry over the network, then you know your hardware is unchanged,

Firmware and BIOS are software, not hardware. At least the kind that are stored on read-write flash instead of Read Only Memory. Which is most of them these days I believe.

However, I don't want to detract from your sentiment softening my comments. The kind of threat model I was describing involves mal-firmware that, asside from reports of NSA-level usage, have not (yet) seen widespread known usage from 'ordinary hackers'. For the threat model of non-state-or-mafia-supported-hackers, doing a wipe of drive, and perhaps for extra paranoia a reflash of the bios and any other user-supported-flashable firmwares, is a reasonable track. But if you are worried about the NSA, it is not enough.

Re:Motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

you sir, are a fucking amateur if you let that sort of management by idiocratic mediocracy prevent you from doing your job.

What you do is you say, sure, OK, there's not enough time to instantiate all the security retrofits; yes, Sir. and then you go out and over the next weeks in the middle of the night on weekends and other "random" times there are all sorts of system failures that require you to do all sorts of work to restore the systems, including all the retrofits. Let them fire you for that; at least you will have done your job. Tell that to the CIO and the Legal Dept. (something about preventing exposure to expensive legal risk) before they hustle you out the door and see if you won't wind up reinstated...

Re:Motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

copious application of thermite. can't be said often enough.

Re:Motherboards

[deconfliction]

also, in case anybody is reading this for educational purposes I should further clarify-

Yes, Tom did say "victim of regular hack". However today's extraordinary hack is tomorrow's script kiddie 'regular hack'. Also, I was implying "firmwares flashable by the OS, or anyone who has gotten root on the OS via a network hack". There can be firmwares that require physical access (write enable jumper) to reflash. I suspect a conspiracy is responsible for write enable jumpers for firmware flashing disappearing (but I'm pretty paranoid).

Re:Motherboards

[Tom]

While that's true, it only applies to the technology used. Script kiddies never evolve, that's what makes them script kiddies (those who do stop being one). So what their hacks lack is creativity. They apply tools they downloaded in scripts they copied for rote attacks. That's why a similarily rote defense and recovery is good enough.

Moronic.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm dumbfounded.

Why on earth would GCHQ and/or the government want to show us so clearly that they are complete morons?

I might assume they are not and that there was some deep purpose to this display of idiocy but I don't see it.

Re:Moronic.

[sce7mjm]

Definitely agree.
I had a mate who's hard disk whose laptop wouldn't boot.
He wanted to get all the personal data of it photos business accounts etc. so opened it up and took out the RAM and the the WIFI Card. And left them in his wood burner for a couple of days.

He then gave me the laptop.

I gave him back his hard drive and bought new ram and a wifi card.
And told him to speak to me first next time.

Re:Moronic.

[Anonymous Coward]

The RAM and WiFi were the most easily removed components and he's a lazy sod?

Re:Moronic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe treaty compliance and the clear ability to blame the Americans? They probably have agreements which say they should use their full powers to destroy copies of classified information. In other words, "security theatre" but the audience is the US security establishment. Not really us.

Re:Moronic.

[Justpin]

You're looking for the TV trope of computer = monitor. Or Computer = tape drive back up system. Many many TV script writers have heroes smash up monitors to destroy computers. There are people who take what they see on TV as gospel and thus do not question it, common tropes for example are hollywood silencers, instant death bullets amongst many. It reaches quite far, there was some sort of book written about gang warfare and police marksmen in the UK. The marksmen were really surprised that when shot the 'bad people' were not blown across the room like in the movies.

Re:Moronic.

[maxwell demon]

Actually modern monitors contain small computers. Or what did you think creates those on-screen menus and handles digital input?

And I could also imagine someone hiding a Raspberry Pi inside some large old CRT ...

Re:Moronic.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all theater, political, technological, journalistic, all of it. Everyone involved (and enough of the audience) knows such theatrics are for public consumption and have no actual effect on events. It's like when the Blue Ribbon Commission announces its conclusions that poverty is bad and childhood illness should be rectified; everybody already knows the outcome (long before the report release) and nobody is fooled by the otiose nonsense they publish or the words they say (which parse out to mean exactly nothing).

Clearly that info could undo the US Government

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes you wonder what atrocities it contains

Re:Clearly that info could undo the US Government

[Anonymous Coward]

Broken treaties with Native Americans?!

Stupidity at it's finest.

[AbRASiON]

For many many reasons but I post for one you'd be surprised at.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/c...

People continue to do this stupid shit to perfectly good hardware, sure it's symbolic in this case to prove a point, none the less any of us here with a fucking grain of common sense realise it's a load of complete shit.

That data could've been copied 10,000 times over from that machine by now (obviously)

Re:Stupidity at it's finest.

[_Shad0w_]

A point the editor even made to the Select Committee. In fact he straight out told them it had been copied elsewhere.

Saturdays and coffee.

[ExXter]

Video Footage just covers the time from timestamp A to B... what happened before A (A-X) and after (B+Y) is not seen. On the other hand, what did those guys want to show? Fear?Moral?Believes? Truth has a way of its own, so destroying some disks will not change the fact that it already made it out once...

Non-storage parts

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that the "intelligence" agency destroyed all the components from the PC, and not just the hard/solid-state disks.

Something isn't adding up...

[sixshot]

I viewed the video and I read the related article... and it says here:

A small team of trusted senior reporters examined Snowden's files in a secure fourth-floor room in the Guardian's King's Cross office. The material was kept on four laptops. None had ever been connected to the internet or any other network. There were numerous other security measures, including round-the-clock guards, multiple passwords, and a ban on electronics.

Okay, 4 laptops are fine. So why does the video show a desktop keyboard? And why is there a completely destroyed ATX desktop motherboard shown there?

Re:Something isn't adding up...

[AHuxley]

The 'computer' was mentioned at 0.49 "drill out the hard disks" at 1.13 at 1.49 "computers"... I would guess some form of a working 'copy' on a desktop computer to be used with by staff in the room. From that internal redacted material could be made ready for publication vs the original material on laptops.

Re:Something isn't adding up...

[donaldm]

Okay, 4 laptops are fine. So why does the video show a desktop keyboard? And why is there a completely destroyed ATX desktop motherboard shown there?

OK That will teach me to read the article.

You are dead right, why a keyboard and possibly a PS/2 keyboard (do modern laptops support this connector any-more? Some other things that don't make sense is the tower PC power supply and the huge fans (I would love to see how they got them in a laptop). Also while we are at it how did they get a standard PC motherboard in a laptop.

As for grinding the boards well words fail me. I suppose that is a bit like destroying RAM especially when we all know those sneaky little bits can hide in the IC's (grin). I especially liked the reply the editor made when he said "po...." and changed his mind. Actually if you wish to destroy a PC (laptop or otherwise) then pack it full of "thermite", light it and the result would be much more interesting, good grief you could even sell tickets.

Then grind the editors.

[sethstorm]

If they can't be assured that destroying the machines will do it, then take it one step further. If they don't quit it, they'll learn how deep and quick of an exfoliation can come from an angle grinder.

If it makes The Guardian actually complain, then you know you're doing the right thing.

Herding wildcats in a burning barn....

[rts008]

Yes, let us NOW close the barn doors after the cats have escaped.....that will stop the cats from escaping!

From my view(USA), the U.K. seems to be following in our footsteps with afterburners engaged.

I remember when everyone was claiming computers would make life easier. LOL! Paperless offices FTW!
(don't misunderstand; I like computers and networks, but from the beginning, I have always questioned the implementation of them as it occurred...one of the reasons why I don't own a cell phone, and studied networking so I could protect some of my privacy, just as I studied driving a vehicle before driving)

The cat is out of the bag/barn door, the best thing for the gov't.s involved is to admit it and make acceptable changes, but don't hold your breath waiting.

The question now is:
Do we fight this crap, or grease up our bungholes and take like a good consumer?(we are no longer citizens or customers...just livestock consuming the crap corp.'s and their bitches(gov't) shovel out.

If you use the term 'consumer' for anything outside of eating and drinking, or physically using something to depletion, then you are part of the problem by accepting this crap.

Consume various media?
I have NEVER eaten or drank an music or video file, I've watched/listened to them, and THEY ARE STILL THERE! So I could not have consumed them.

This may seem like an offtopic rant, but the brainwash mentality is what makes this crap work.

We have gotten into a mindset from this tactic that makes this shite easier to swallow, because we get used to swallowing shite. We have forgotten how to find out for ourselves, we WANT the 10 second soundbite because we are too busy swallowing the shite, to fit in with our shite swallowing peers.

I personally am too old, broken down, and poor to start the needed coup, but will gladly join in if it ever happens.

Here in the USA 20 years ago, if what happened under Bush jr.'s reign happened then, I would have started(or at least attempted) another revolution...strictly out of patriotic feelings for the oath I took to defend the Constitution of the USA, and Dubya and company would have been first against the wall to be shot as a traitor to the Constitution I pledged to uphold against enemies foreign and domestic.

Apparently, my peers are happy to have the following generations buggered, and now it's showing up.

In retrospect, I would include Obama and co. for not doing away with all of Bush/Cheney's constitutional violations.

As it stands, I will do everything within my power and ability to train and educate the younger generations to combat this crap.

Note to self: Quit posting when drinking!
  I meant everything above, but focus and eloquence decline severely when drinking!

Apologies if I sound like some butthurt old geezer, but I am one, due to the 'War on Drugs', 'War on terrorism', War on this', War on that', alcohol is my only outlet short of ending up on the evening news as some nutjob taken out by the local SWAT Team. :-)

OK, now all of you all, get off my lawn!
*chugs bottle of Geritol*

Re:Herding wildcats in a burning barn....

[AHuxley]

Well the gov internet searches seem to be for locations, names and further digital contacts as 1 - 2 - 3 hops to and from the press for example.
The vast illegal domestic surveillance system is built like an elint overflight of the Soviet Union collecting everything it can.
Its their network, every keystroke you make is kept, sorted, indexed, filed, read by a real person if your on a list...
Build on that - read up all you can on the side of politics you find interesting and write long detailed emails to members of the press working on the stories.
Link them to material you have found, others working on the same stories .. detail is good, use your own email, lots of good grammar and keep all the technical words in.
Material found in old newspapers, new searches - pack in the local/national political intrigue over years.
Start to attend protests, anything local on any issue - drive in your own car, park near the event and stay the duration to ensure your photographed ect..
If asked for your ID....
Overtime you name will filter up in a few local and national databases - you will make new 'instant' friends at events who seem to share a lot of the same interests ...
Like a protester outside an East German Church watch the full power of the state in 2014 have to react to your walking around with a sign or HD camera or talking to the press...

Re:Herding wildcats in a burning barn....

[eyenot]

I personally am too old, broken down, and poor to start the needed coup, but will gladly join in if it ever happens.

Free Riders only serve to scuttle their political boats.

another victory for freedom!

[Anonymous Coward]

Her Majesty must be so very proud of her loyal peons.

This was done to protect the Guardian as well

[sce7mjm]

I think the Guardian guy is being deliberately vague, since they now have evidence that they destroyed all of their copies.

They are now only going to report on the information that others are leaking.

It is PR for GCHQ and the Government, i.e. don't hold documents you know you shouldn't cos we'll smash your shit up.

It is part of the legal defence of the Guardian, "We aren't distributing this information, but are now free to report the information that others have released to the public"

By the way IANAL, it just seems like common sense to me.

Re:old news

[Anonymous Coward]

For the low quality trolling?

Gaynigs eating hot grits blah blah blah whatever.

Video Is Missing One Thing

[BlueStrat]

A "laugh track".

Just sayin'...

Strat

Re:Video Is Missing One Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Its actually quite good if you watch to the gungam style track.....

It has happened.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is f*cking scary

bread and games

[Anonymous Coward]

So,
  all data is destroyed, so,
anything released since the destruction of the datacarriers is false, a
anything released since the destruction is a way to control the public, and yes, even the conspiracy nuts are part of the public which gets controlled....

panem et circenses

Headling is wrong

[wonkey_monkey]

GCHQ Destroying Laptop Full of Snowden Disclosures

As the summary actually makes clear, one of the interesting about this incident is that the Guardian editors opted to destroy the laptop themselves, instead of letting GCHQ do it.

I thought destruction of evidence was illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those materials contained evidence of criminal acts committed. Destruction of that evidence is also a criminal act.

But oh wait, it's government. We are powerless to hold them accountable for criminal acts.

We are slaves. Once again.

Re:I thought destruction of evidence was illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

But oh wait, it's government. We are powerless to hold them accountable for criminal acts.

That's why cops become cops: so they can break into people's homes and wreck the place, beat suspects, and murder random people, all without criminal charges against them.

God you're an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the UK *does* have a drone program and there are no laws forbidding the use of drones by the UK.

Keep putting your foot in your mouth in a lame attempt to absolve your precious UK from criticism.

Danger, top secret electronics dust

[Craig Ringer]

It's probably been so long since they released it because GCHQ had to vet the video to make sure you couldn't reconstruct the document from the fragments visible during the video.

They seem to be about that level of tech-literate.

Re:Danger, top secret electronics dust

[_Shad0w_]

You appear to be confusing GCHQ with the Home Office. I very much doubt the instructions for this little bit of theatre came out of GCHQ; it pretty obviously political theatre.

Re:Danger, top secret electronics dust

[mysidia]

It's probably been so long since they released it because GCHQ had to vet the video to make sure you couldn't reconstruct the document from the fragments visible during the video.

Actually... we came up with a device that can mess with entropy so much; that the dust particles are expected to spontaneously come back together and reassemble themselves into chips and disk drives, with no damage whatsoever, and then the data wlill be retrievalbe again.

Silly Paranoid Hard Drive Destruction

[retroworks]

Even if it was true that one can economically retrieve data after it has been erased / overwritten a few times, the buzz-sawing of individual chips in this video fans the paranoia of people over hard drives. You can disassemble the hard drive, or hit it once with a ball peen hammer. Drilling multiple holes through ceramic chips borders on the Pythonesque. Perhaps they were being tongue-in-cheek during the application of physical overkill, but it fans the billion dollar planned obsolescence industry. Most data theft occurs from machines still in use (hacked or downloaded from or stolen), I'm unaware of a single case of a hard drive chip being reassembled to get out the latent data.

Anyway, the safest thing would actually be to produce fake, falsified, false positive Snowden files, hire a team of anti-Snowdens to just make up balderdash, and distribute their files all over the web, not by trying to physically destroy hardware on which the real data is stored. Metadata should be particularly easy to camouflage with digital haystacks of misinformation.

Journalistic intermediary

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. In theory, you're right. But when the secret service thugs start showing up at newspapers -- as it's happening now -- perhaps it's time to think about uncontrolled release.

$DEITY knows how often newspapers just hadn't the courage.

Re:Journalistic intermediary

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. In theory, you're right. But when the secret service thugs start showing up at newspapers -- as it's happening now -- perhaps it's time to think about uncontrolled release.

The laptop in question wasn't the only copy of the documents. Destroying it did nothing to take the documents out of the hands of the journalists to whom it had been entrusted.

Uncontrolled release is the insurance policy, and I hope it doesn't get to the point where we learn if that half-terabyte of data floating around out there is everything he took, or just a big string of random ones and zeroes.

Destroying the evil.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they then sprinkle the fragments with holy water? 'Cause if they didn't they'll just grow together again and continue to make trouble.
.
.
.

Perfect Cover-All Solution

[Toad-san]

Now, no matter what the government demands, the Guardian can always say "Oh yeah, that .. it was on that laptop. Remember that laptop?"

Let them know how you feel...

[bl968]

I have already sent in my email to their customer support letting them know if this happens I cancel my account.

why use a hammer to kill a fly

[Anonymous Coward]

why use all those tools, just install windows...

Only when it works

[Anonymous Coward]

You make it sound like journalistic intermediaries are untouchable.

After David Miranda, partner of U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald, was "detained" journalists got the message. Touch something too big, too dirty, too damaging, and "freedom of the press" won't protect you.

Re:Only when it works

[tinkerton]

You make it sound like journalistic intermediaries are untouchable.

Wikileaks can go to multiple journalists to avoid whatever problems with individual journalists/or papers, and they do. The main problem I see with journalists is the 'mainstream journalism' problems that Chomsky described. A kind of conformism that is timid , compliant, and narrowminded, but not really coerced. They'll publish, but will draw weak conclusions and miss the point.

I think Greenwald's ideas are actually pretty close to Chomsky on this and I wonder what he'd have to say about Assange wanting to publish on his own.

Digitards? Yes, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Were the GCHQ people being digitards? Yes, of course. They *know* that the information did not stop at the current place, yet they insist that the exercise take place. It would be interesting if the Guardian even put in other drives (new empty ones) so that the GCHQ people could watch the Guardian news people destroy something (anything) in the name of 'doing something'. It all reminds me of the security theatre that goes on with the TSA at American airports. Its a pointless exercise, done in the name of 'showing that we are doing something'. Effective? Hardly. But people who don't know any better are well inconvenienced along with everyone else, and those who are clueless feel better. They aren't any safer, but they get a warm feeling regardless. It has the secondary benefit of showing how dickish the GCHQ and the other 'Four Eyes' can be. "I Said So!" is the heavy handed, draconian "fuck rule of law" mantra that they live by. "Because I can!" is the reasoning. Security theatre, where the actors beat up on the audience and force them five times as much on exiting the theatre as they were charged to enter the theatre. If you argue, the price doubles (to 10x).

Good points, Bad points to journalistic middlemen

[billstewart]

There were some really good points to it - putting the story into coherent form requires somebody reading through immense piles of documentation to find the interesting individual parts and the interesting trends from the big pile of other data, and releasing it at a pace that's going to keep the public's attention rather than either not getting noticed or having their eyes glaze over (how much of the public actually read through the whole Pentagon Papers - or needed to do so to get the general idea of what their government was doing?)

And yes, there are parts that it's important NOT to release without redaction - the EFF's slide about "Why Metadata Matters" also means that there might be documents in the Snowden collection that are metadata about "people who are not targets and we're, like, totally not 'collecting' data on" that the government shouldn't have collected, like "AIDS Clinic A called Person X, who called Dr. D and Insurance Company I", or "Hey, Agent Smith, here's the data we've got on Ahmed A, is it enough to put him on the no-fly list?" "No, not really".

But except for any personal data that ought to be redacted, I think it makes sense to have the whole pile available to the public. The NSA's argument that it might reveal "sources and methods" just says "Hey, dude, not fair releasing metadata on us!"

They DO belong fully in the open, unredacted

[Vlijmen Fileer]

They DO belong on the piratebay. You said it yourself; they are /false/ accusations. By giving them to an intermediary to prevent these false accusations from being brought into play you /actually give credibility/ to these false accusations.
Then again, it does give the leaker some protection against prosecution for these false accusations :).
But to me, the balance is still wrong: stepping back for false accusations is a road into the abyss. The only wise long-term approach in this case is to fight all falsehood right-on.

Re:They DO belong fully in the open, unredacted

[tinkerton]

(beter late than never) Well I don't agree. The idea of unredacted bulk leaking is a lot more radical - a lot more fringe - then that of a specialized node for whistleblowers. That means it alienates a lot of people who would have been on board with the wikileaks program. So it's not just a matter of protecting yourself against false accusations.

Personally I also think it's based on misunderstandings of how mainstream media work. The important part about the data is the interpretation. People don't (or very rarely) go to the source, they read the interpretation of the source. And mainstream media have earned themselves a bad reputation about interpretation, not so much about hiding data. You can always do interpretation in parallel.

They've also dropped the ball concerning going hunting for the data, lack of interest in it, which I think has been a motivation for starting wikileaks. But once the data is there the added value of publishing the data in parallel is minimal, while the loss of support is huge. Apart from the actual damage that is being done.

This means nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

They can destroy the originals, but probably have several copies.

Electron microscopes not enough

[Sits]

The "Can you recover overwritten data?" question was answered a few years ago in the paper Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy. The conclusion was with an electron microscope you could get 1 bit back but the chance of recovering more than that is negligible (and that is in the new barely used drive scenario).

Re:Electron microscopes not enough

[phantomfive]

Good to know, thx

+1 not a security idiot like the average slashdott

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing needs be said.

FARSE!

[Anonymous Coward]

What a total and utter FARSE!

Vetting, Vetting, who does the vetting?

[rhalstead]

Vetting, Vetting, who does the vetting? We certainly don't want the government to be the lord and master of what we can see, hear, and read. That is one of the first steps to a totalitarian state. Still, as the press has virtually stopped reporting and now make the news. Rather than talking heads doing the partisan bit, the reporting is biased to the point of absurdity. Reporters ceased being reporters some time back and now report the news to favor, or denounce candidates, the constitution, people's life style, and religion. They discredit anyone who disagrees with them, be it left or right. So the networks can not be trusted to present stories in an unbiased light either. At present many of the networks just parrot the present administration's views. As I said, that's the talking heads job, not the reporter's. It would certainly be nice to be able to find unbiased news. If the FCC stuck by its own rules, they’d revoke the licenses of most radio and TV networks. I'm old enough that I can remember when we had real reporters, not cheerleaders for one side or the other. In general they didn’t distort the facts to suit their goals. Today, it takes no more than a few sentences to know where the reporter is headed with a story. That's the job of the talking heads, not the reporter. Theirs is to write the story, not their opinion, nor to distort the facts, or make them up where none exist. Cast doubt on the opposition. Most of these so called reporters wouldn't have been able to keep a job 30 years ago. “The News” is no longer a place where a person can stay informed. It is only a presentation for the left or right. .