Mystery of Guardian mobos and graphics cards which 'held Snowden files'

Well if that shoddy work constitutes a days wage then im going to hand my CV to the GCHQ - for a life of easy peasy non-work work :D

Symbolism

My guess was that the "security specialists" knew this was a pointless exercise, but nonetheless one which they had been ordered to perform. As such they probably didn't particularly care which computers were destroyed, or whether they actually had copies of the data on, provided they could go back to base and say that they had witnessed the destruction of some computers and had directed their destruction in accordance with department guidelines/best practice.

Hmm

I don't see the remains of a USB flash drive. Or the cloud backup for that matter.

Note to self: Keep some defunct PC parts handy so when the security services come knocking, I can present them with suitable looking debris worked over with a hammer.

I have this old toaster sitting around ....

On the bright side

The plot for the next series of the IT Crowd has just written itself

violated

On the one hand Snowden says they have access to all social media then Miranda (according to the BBC) says he felt violated at having to give them his passwords for social media.

I'm confused now, what does the "media" want me to think? That the original story was all lies and that they don't have access as indirectly this has come from the Guardian

On a side note it's nice to see my computer now knows my exact location, I remember the days when it could only pick you up from where you hit the net at your isp.

Re. files

Yeah, the lack of SSD destruction is a bit suspicious.

I'd have copied all the data onto SD cards and hidden it under the tiles in the rest room, waited until the coast was clear and retrieved them.

Also relevant, the data on the Macbook Air is stored on a miniPCIe card IIRC, this can be removed easily and simply replaced with a convincing-but-not-working card from an old netbook.

Its not like anyone booted up the MBA to see if it still worked before smashing it.

Maybe the destroyed components where necessary to unencrypt the encrypted data held on backups?

Is any of this linked with the google outage the other night and also the tragic death of the young spook found locked in a bag that he apparently locked himself?

extrajudicial acts by the government

if there was a legal leg to stand on, the government and it's agencies would have been down the court getting the judge to sign warants and injunctions.

This is a pure extrajudicial operation, and people should be going to prison for it, starting with the ministers that authorised this assult on people and their private property.

Where did they find an angle grinder in a newspaper office?

Unpowered RAM data

How do you get it out without, umm, applying power

How do you torture a BOFH?

Make him destroy his own kit!

Missed opportunity...

Wouldn't it have been fun to tell the spooks that the data had spent some time backed up on your S3 / Google Drive / MSN account (or all three) and then watch them happily skip away to do some real damage to a distributed datacentre somewhere?

Or wouldn't that work?

Disposal

Was this WEEE compliant?

Those are Retina Macbook Pro Logic Boards

I'm surprised no one else has identified the Apple boards are from 15" Macbook Pro with Retina Display machines. The cable coming out of one end is the giveaway.