re: #50 Justanotherhuman

From the Huffer piece:

In Britain, where there is no First Amendment and where the heroic editor of the Guardian newspaper, Alan Rusbridger, keeps publishing Snowden’s revelations, the government has threatened to shut Rusbridger down.

The current issue of the New York Review of Books contains Rusbridger’s chilling account of being forced by British government agents to destroy computers that continued Snowden’s leaked documents, an absurd act of pure harassment since back-up copies of the documents were kept in New York. He wrote:

It is harder than you might think to destroy an Apple MacBook Pro according to British government standards. In a perfect world the officials who want to destroy such machines prefer them to be dropped into a kind of giant food mixer that reduces them to dust. Lacking such equipment, The Guardian purchased a power drill and angle grinder on July 20 this year and — under the watchful eyes of two state observers — ripped them into obsolescence.

Yes, the British government was being ‘tyrannical’ when it ordered the destruction of copies of information that could get British subjects killed. Seriously, how can Robert Kuttner write that schlock? To use the British word for it, it’s risible. It lacks a basic understanding of the first duty of a national government, which is to protect the nation and its people from harm.