The Way GCHQ Obliterated The Guardian’s Laptops May Have Revealed More Than It Intended
In July 2013, GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, forced journalists at the London headquarters of The Guardian to completely obliterate the memory of the computers on which they kept copies of top-secret documents provided to them by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.
However, in its attempt to destroy information, GCHQ also revealed intriguing details about what it did and why.
Two technologists, Mustafa Al-Bassam and Richard Tynan, visited Guardian headquarters last year to examine the remnants of the devices. Al-Bassam is an ex-hacker who two years ago pleaded guilty to joining attacks on Sony, Nintendo, and other companies, and now studies computer science at King’s College; Tynan is a technologist at Privacy International with a PhD in computer science. The pair concluded, first, that GCHQ wanted The Guardian to completely destroy every possible bit of information the news outlet might retain; and second, that GCHQ’s instructions may have inadvertently revealed all the locations in your computer where information may be covertly stored.
Footage of Guardian editors physically destroying their MacBooks and USB drives, taken by Guardian executive Sheila Fitzsimons, wasn’t released until months later, in January 2014. The GCHQ agents who supervised the destruction of the devices also insisted on recording it all on their own iPhones.
The Guardian’s video reveals editors using angle-grinders, revolving drills, masks that GCHQ ordered them to buy, and a “degausser,” an expensive piece of equipment provided by GCHQ, which destroys magnetic fields and thereby erases data. The procedure eliminated practically every chip in the device, leaving almost no recognizable piece of machinery behind. The whole process lasted over three hours.
“Normally people just destroy the hard drive,” said Al-Bassam. But GCHQ took it several steps further. The spy agency instructed Guardian editors to destroy parts of multiple MacBook Airs’ track pad controllers, power controllers, keyboards, CPUs, inverting converters, USB drives, and more.
But in allowing The Guardian’s editors to destroy the devices themselves, and hold onto the remaining shards of computer dust, the British government essentially revealed those policies — by making it possible for people like Al-Bassam and Tynan to analyze just why they might have destroyed each part in such a specific way.
The track pad controller, they said, can hold up to 2 megabits of memory. All the different “chips” in your computer — from the part that controls the device’s power to the chips in the keyboard — also have the capacity to store information, like passwords and keys to other data, which can be uploaded through firmware updates.
Read the full (archived) report here:
https://archive.is/pJgV4
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/26/way-gchq-obliterated-guardians-laptops-revealed-intended/