Last year British-based newspaper The Guardian was forced to destroy hard drives with information provided by Edward Snowden, and now the paper has released video of those hard drives being destroyed while British intelligence officials stand there and watch. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed last August that a senior government official demanded the “destruction of all the material we were working on” related to Snowden and the revelations over government surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ, Britain’s intelligence agency. And now there is video of that very destruction occurring, with intelligence officials watching it.

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The Guardian also has more details about the circumstances of the hard drives getting obliterated beyond all use.

Under the watchful gaze of two technicians from the British government spy agency GCHQ, the journalists took angle-grinders and drills to the internal components, rendering them useless and the information on them obliterated…With the threat of punitive legal action ever present, the only way of protecting the Guardian’s team – and of carrying on reporting from another jurisdiction – was for the paper to destroy

its own computers. GCHQ officials wanted to inspect the material before destruction, carry out the operation themselves and take the remnants away. The Guardian refused.After the destruction on Saturday 20 July, reporting switched entirely to the US. Despite these tensions, the paper continued to consult with the government before publishing national security stories. There were more than 100 interactions with No 10, the White House and US and UK intelligence agencies.

Glenn Greenwald wrote most of his NSA exposés for The Guardian before leaving to start a new media enterprise.

Watch the video below, via The Guardian:

[h/t HuffPost]

[photo via screengrab]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

Tags: Edward Snowden, The Guardian