The Basement Tape

The Guardian filmed it: journalists in a basement with angle grinders and power drills, destroying hard drives and USB sticks containing Edward Snowden’s files. This was July 2013. British intelligence, on behalf of the NSA, had forced the newspaper to physically eliminate the evidence of mass surveillance before the story could be fully reported. So they smashed it. On video.

I keep thinking about the sound of it. Angle grinders aren’t quiet. Neither are drills. The methodical destruction of your own evidence because someone in power asked you to. The weird obedience of it—not secret, not shameful even, just procedural.

A newspaper destroying its own reporting. The thing you’re supposed to do when you find out something important is tell people. They had to un-tell it instead, grind the proof to nothing under government supervision.

I don’t remember any particular outrage about this, which I think is the point. It’s not a scandal if everyone accepts it. The government requires you to destroy something, you destroy it, the story leaks anyway months later, and everybody moves on. The papers write about it, people read about it, and then what? The machinery demonstrated what it would do. That’s the real message, not in the documents but in the basement, in the angle grinders, in the fact that compliance just happens.