In So the innocent have nothing to fear? After David Miranda we now know where this leads, Simon Jenkins, former editor of the London Times and now a columnist for the Guardian, compares the smashing of a newspaper's computers to book burning. His outraged column yesterday begins with a British official's comment: "You've had your fun: now we want the stuff back."
With these words the British government embarked on the most bizarre act of state censorship of the internet age. In a Guardian basement, officials from GCHQ gazed with satisfaction on a pile of mangled hard drives like so many book burners sent by the Spanish Inquisition. They were unmoved by the fact that copies of the drives were lodged round the globe. They wanted their symbolic auto-da-fe. Had the Guardian refused this ritual they said they would have obtained a search and destroy order from a compliant British court.
Knighted in 2004 for his services to journalism, Sir Jenkins continues:
Two great forces are now in fierce but unresolved contention. The material revealed by Edward Snowden through the Guardian and the Washington Post is of a wholly different order from WikiLeaks and other recent whistle-blowing incidents. It indicates not just that the modern state is gathering, storing and processing for its own ends electronic communication from around the world; far more serious, it reveals that this power has so corrupted those wielding it as to put them beyond effective democratic control. It was not the scope of NSA surveillance that led to Snowden's defection. It was hearing his boss lie to Congress about it for hours on end.
Jenkins notes that Congressional investigators have found the NSA has simply disregarded some of the FISA court's orders "to destroy intercepts, emails and files." Jenkins notes also that Congress has confronted James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, about his less than truthful statements, and President Obama has said the Patriot Act may need revision. However, Jenkins sees no such response in Britain. He says the British spooks even boast about their "light oversight regime compared to the US." He calls any governmental or legal control there "a charade, a patsy of the secrecy lobby."
Reminding us that it has been mainstream newspapers in London and Washington which have "researched, coordinated and edited the Snowden revelations," Jenkins says:
They have even held back material that the NSA and GCHQ had proved unable to protect. No blog, Twitter or Facebook campaign has the resources or the clout to confront the power of the state.
In conclusion, to the official who told the Guardian's editor: "You have had your debate. There's no need to write any more," Sir Jenkins retorts:
"Yes, there bloody well is."