Guardian chief says UK destroyed hard drives to stop Snowden secrets

Fox News ^ | 8/20/2013 | Unattributed

[mojito]

The Guardian newspaper's editor says British authorities destroyed an unspecified number of its hard drives in an apparent attempt to keep secrets leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden from Chinese spies.

Alan Rusbridger made the claim in an opinion piece published Monday on the Guardian's website, saying that a pair of staffers from British eavesdropping agency GCHQ monitored the process in what he called "one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history."

He said the hard drives were torn apart in the basement of the Guardian's north London office with "two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction ... just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents."

It was not clear exactly when the incident occurred. Rusbridger gave a vague timeline, suggesting that it happened within the past month or so.

[mojito]

So much of interest here.

[freedumb2003]

Unless you grind all the HD surfaces, “broken” HDDs can have their data recovered.

[Uncle Miltie]

Because nobody has offsite storage or thumb drives.

[Uncle Miltie]

http://www.informaticacloud.com/products/cloud-services/data-replication-service.html

[Uncle Miltie]

Available at Walmart!

[KarlInOhio]

Because nobody has offsite storage or thumb drives.

Only 5500 of these babies to back up a 1 TB drive.

[null and void]

Related thread here (Not a duplicate!)

[CivilWarBrewing]

LOL! The Chinese have it all anyway.

[EQAndyBuzz]

Seriously? All of this because Obamas goon squad at the NSA got hold of Tea Party phone records and passed them off to the IRS.

This has to be the most despicable case of wag the dog perpetuated on the American people ever.

[TexasCajun]

That's me in the chair, years and years ago.

Tapes and washing-machine size disk drives.

[massgopguy]

Head Crash in a CDC 300MB disk drive meant 8 hours overtime.

[massgopguy]

Head Crash in a CDC 300MB disk drive meant 8 hours overtime.

[Black Agnes]

Wow. I bet you remember when core memory was a bunch of little washer thingies strung on wires...

[TexasCajun]

Wow. I bet you remember when core memory was a bunch of little washer thingies strung on wires...

No, not that. ...but we loaded JCL and trays and trays of punched data like this:

[Black Agnes]

I remember punch cards from when I started college. They were being phased out even then. Drop a stack and wow...your life sucks for a while.

I think I still have a stack somewhere for historical purposes.

[SkyDancer]

Guess they never heard of backups - and off-site backups.

[Black Agnes]

It’s kabuki. Every major corporation uses Iron Mountain or its equivalent. Insurance companies fairly insist.

[usconservative]

Anyone who believes these were the ACTUAL hard drives that Snowden had is his possession being destroyed, is a fool.

[usconservative]

I remember those --- learned machine level programming on punch cards. Better have numbered 'em manually because if you dropped the stack, you were screwed!

Remember the IBM & WANG 300mb Disk Pack drives that were the size of washing machines? Had to be so careful pulling the disc's out too.... what a PITA.