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Now On Video: GCHQ Destroying Laptop Full of Snowden Disclosures

Posted by timothy on from the ask-not-what-your-country-can-destroy-for-you dept.

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."

2 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What about the copies? by Immerman · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  2. Re:Wasn't this a movie? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 ...