"The White House responded with surprise to the report of the destruction. Asked at his daily briefing on Tuesday whether President Obama's administration would enter a US media company and destroy media hard drives – even to protect national security – the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said: "That's very difficult – to imagine a scenario in which that would be appropriate."
It's not as if the USA has ever coerced an innocent person into giving up their livelihood without benefit of due process (http://lavabit.com).
1600 Penn doesn't need to physically destroy hard drives when a 46-cent stamp and and NSL has the same outcome.
Beyond that, I'm not sure why they commented on this at all, considering they have zero credibility on the matter. It just makes them look worse...if that is really possible.
> It's not as if the USA has ever coerced an innocent person into giving up their livelihood without benefit of due process (http://lavabit.com).
Is this an arguing tactic or do you really believe that?
They didn't coerce him, he did the equivalent of resigning in protest. They might be the reason why he did it, but they did not actually make him do it.
> Beyond that, I'm not sure why they commented on this at all, considering they have zero credibility on the matter. It just makes them look worse...if that is really possible.
They are trying to backpedal, they realize people are unhappy at this whole business and are trying to walk it back without looking weak. You should be happy about them saying this, since it's at least a start.
The NSA leaks seem to express a national security state that is immune to all but the most terrible publicity. Yet it seems like the escalation of power and arrogance means that said national security state is generating exactly that level of terrible publicity, demonstrating a cynically cavalier attitude so extreme it is actually keeping the situation in the lime light.
And of course we know that which nation engages in what exact tactic is somewhat beside the point. The Americans would say "we wouldn't force the destruction of hard drives" with what is now the standard, the standard, kind of disingenuous secret caveat; "no, WE would steal the data in the middle of the night" or "we would have the courts first declare the reporters to be non-reporters and then throw them Guantanamo" or whatever.
I think their problem is that the intelligence world is used to acting like arrogant cowboys running roughshod over the rule of law with no oversight. If they want to kidnap someone or steal something or assassinate people they usually just do it. And they always get their way, license to kill is a real thing. But in this situation their targets are highly public and sympathetic so they don't seem to know how to hold themselves back for the sake of PR. It will hopefully be their undoing.
Is it? Tacitus, Livy, Suetonius, Marcellinus, Plutarch say otherwise.
TLDR:
As long as citizens think they have something to lose [1], their fear will be used against them by the Praetorian guard, all the way to the Crisis of the Third Century and subsequent dissolution of the empire.
---------
[1] We are all going to die no more than once, with no luggage allowed at checkout. What is there to lose?
For those not in the know, in the US this is actually a valid legal avenue for asset forfeiture. The term is "in rem jurisdiction". IANAL, and I wonder exactly what defense there is against all of one's hardware being sued (since my impression is that the owner lacks standing).
Well they boondoggle'd this one, however the conspiracy theorist in me believes that this is a pointed distraction aimed at directing attention away from the Whitehouse/NSA. GCHQ is the sacrificial lamb, to put it bluntly.
Replace all instances of "GCHQ" with "NSA" and it should quickly sink in how serious this matter is. Imagine if NSA officers had stormed the Washington Post's office in a similar fashion, threatening and ignorantly ordering the destruction of a variety of named and un-named hard-drives.
How could GCHQ have known which hard-drives were which? Baffling.
It beggars belief that GCHQ would send out Sean the Enforcer to say "Oy! Give us the fookin secrets or we break yer fookin kneecaps!" and the fling around 0.01% of their office equipment. Signals intelligence people simply do not do that. Actual spies rarely do it. Hell, spies in badly written television try to avoid it.
What would really happen is that a GCHQ man from Eton would call up one of his old school chums at the newspaper and they would work out some quid pro quo over tea. Quietly. Discreetly. Like professional spies.
It is barely possible that a rogue group inside GCHQ did this in a spasm of stupidity. It is just an unlikely chain of events for a rogue group to form, obtain the information, and on their own decide to make a spectacular public intervention. That sort of thing simply is not cricket.
My bet is that an outside handler goaded the GCHQ misfits squad into doing something, possibly even planting false orders. France, Russia, and China all have good reason to run GCHQ into the ground.
NSA? Not so much. Britain has long used intelligence sharing with the U.S. to punch way above their weight in international politics. The NSA would not casually throw such a valuable partner under the bus.
Whatever happened, we can at least have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever squad of fuck-knuckles organized the newspaper job are being questioned until their fingernails curl up. And then reassigned to surveil bears in Siberia.
The reason matters. It's like if grandma seems to have set your dog on fire. You don't say "Oh, what a malicious old bag she is." You dig into the complete chain of events to find out the root cause.
Occam's Razor also dictates that a trivially predictable outcome is an intended outcome. This media circus is trivially predictable. Ergo someone, somewhere is counting on the Internet mob to demand rough justice and shout down deeper analysis.
One of my defenses of government in the types of conspiracy theories that get batted around here on HN is that government is staffed by people who are just as stupid as the rest of us, all the way up to the top. The vast majority of people I've met working in government are upstanding, want to do the right thing by their position and the people, but they have just as much highs and lows of average intelligence as the rest of the population. If your one decision maker is on the low end of that spectrum then there is the potential for ridiculously stupid acts to occur.
There's no reason this shouldn't apply to GCHQ (and NSA) just as much as it applies to the rest of government. Is it truly impossible that an agency that never operates under press scrutiny would be unfamiliar with which of their actions would exacerbate press scrutiny?
I don't know the org. structure for GCHQ but NSA falls under DOD and so there is definitely some familiarity with the idea of "Public Affairs", even if NSA typically never has to engage in such.
It's tempting to think that the media response is intentional on the part of the intelligence agencies. On the other hand:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I have a feeling that a lot of salaries within these agencies depend on not understanding the inevitable media response to heavy-handed tactics like these.
Your reason for doubting that the GCHQ didn't do it is that it sounds off, but your alternative hypothesis is more complicated and there is no actual evidence of it. Your hypothesis is supported only by your feelings about GCHQ.
I too like the image of the old Eton boys club handling things smartly and discretely but my gut feeling is that once 100 billion of foreign money is on the table and politicians are involved, things can get a little primitive, very quickly.
My feeling is it's probably more important to certain parties at this point to maintain alliances and justify budgets than to maintain certain civil liberties of the public at large. At least that is the way it seems.
I think this is likely damage control. However, it also shows that Americans are lucky to have our founding documents.
While they aren't always effective in stopping government overreach, and we are living in a dangerous time for the ideals expressed within them, at least our government will always have to pay them lip-service.
Okay, this is borderline sick. Just combine "Theresa May, the home secretary, confirmed that she was given advance notice of Miranda's detention as she praised the police action [...]" with "Lord Falconer of Thoroton, the former Labour lord chancellor who was involved in introducing the anti-terror legislation used to detain Miranda, said the police had no right to detain him under the Terrorism Act 2000."
Let me paraphrase that a bit.
The police: "Hey guys, we're going to abuse the anti-terror laws and intimidate a highly visible journalist and his family. This might be illegal."
The police oversight body: "Who cares?"
The UK home office have effectively announced that they are not doing their job. Even when expressly told in advance that the police will break the law in a very visible way, they choose to ignore it.
That must be either gross negligence or crass incompetence.
1) Where on Earth did you get the idea that the job of the Home Office is police oversight? That would be the IPCC. The Home Office has been the home of Big Brother in the UK for some time now.
2) It's doubtful whether they broke the law. That's part of the issue, the law has been badly mutilated to the point where it is legal to harass people without any suspicion of wrongdoing. It's lovely and considerate of Lord Falconer to condemn what he has enabled, but unfortunately it accomplishes bugger all. It's not as if this wasn't foreseen and protested at the time, so such cries of "oh but THAT's not what we had in mind at all!" are at best disingenuous.
It's not as if the USA has ever coerced an innocent person into giving up their livelihood without benefit of due process (http://lavabit.com).
1600 Penn doesn't need to physically destroy hard drives when a 46-cent stamp and and NSL has the same outcome.
Beyond that, I'm not sure why they commented on this at all, considering they have zero credibility on the matter. It just makes them look worse...if that is really possible.