- It has come to light that the Obama administration was aware in advance of the British govt’s plans to force The Guardian newspaper to demolish all the hard disks and memory chips given to it by Edward Snowden, and that top NSA officials celebrate the event.
- The computers contained documents about the top secret surveillance activities by USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.
- A few weeks after The Guardian published the first documents provided by Snowden, under threat by the GCHQ it agreed to destroy the data.
- When asked if it had advance knowledge of the same, the Obama administration had refused and stated that this displayed the higher freedom of press in US.
- However, as per a heavily redacted set of internal NSA mails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by The Associated Press, it is seen that intelligence officials in the US govt’s office knew about this in advance and seen as a good news.
- The Director of National Intelligence conceded the same; their destruction was seen to have a large impact as it cut down the repositories of the raw documents and reduced the risk if they would have been disseminated in bulk.
- Read at:http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-international/us-knew-about-guardian-hard-drives-destruction-last-year/article6207629.ece