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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Snowden Files: The Paragraph began to delete itself.
Luke Harding has written a book about Snowden, he was invited to do so by the Guardian Editors. He went into the secret room, and read many of the documents provided by Edward Snowden before they were destroyed by GCHQ, the British Secret Intelligence Service. I haven't read the book yet, but this article in the Guardian about the book was interesting.
Over the next few weeks these incidents of remote deletion happened several times. There was no fixed pattern but it tended to occur when I wrote disparagingly of the NSA. All authors expect criticism. But criticism before publication by an anonymous, divine third party is something novel. I began to leave notes for my secret reader. I tried to be polite, but irritation crept in. Once I wrote: "Good morning. I don't mind you reading my manuscript – you're doing so already – but I'd be grateful if you don't delete it. Thank you." There was no reply.
This is after people surreptitiously tried to eavesdrop on his meeting with Greenwald, and after an American named "Chris" befriended him and invited him to go out sightseeing in Rio.
Read the whole article, it would be dismissed as a bad spy novel if it wasn't for one thing. We know the NSA/CIA/GCHQ/is there an end to this parade of acronyms/FBI is gathering information on everyone.
Oh I have bought the book. I'm finishing another one now, and soon will be reading it. I have a feeling that it's not going to be like Fred Cook's book, but still it might be interesting.
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gcomeau
(5,764 posts)That's like some 10 year old child's conception of how Big Brother would try to monitor and suppress criticism in the press.
Deleting isolated little paragraphs of text remotely from someone's computer... while they're writing it so can obviously see what you're doing... and doing it by, what? Some dedicated remote monitor the NSA is paying to sit at a computer stabbing at a backspace key to delete one character at a time in the most clumsy and inefficient and obvious way possible????
Calling that something out of a bad spy novel is an insult to bad spy novels.
msanthrope
(37,549 posts)a rather good book on being harassed by them, I think he might be credible. Who knows who it was?
stevenleser
(32,886 posts)if nothing else.
If you have access to the OS to the point it seems whoever was doing this had access, its a simpler, or at least more covert matter to crash the OS and delete the file or revert it to a prior version.
An agent doing this ought to have worried that the person working on the article would whip out a smart phone and video what was happening.
msanthrope
(37,549 posts)But for all we know, Schrodinger's cat was hitting the delete key.
2banon
(7,321 posts)2banon
(7,321 posts)sickeningly obvious bs. Perhaps the Guardian IS aiming to capture 10 year olds as "readers"? That would explain it I suppose.
gulliver
(13,186 posts)RC
(25,592 posts)And do it in a way that didn't sound very plausible when told.
seattledo
(295 posts)Snowden action figures:
Actually, I wouldn't mind having one. He's probably done more to support freedom in this country than anyone else.
2banon
(7,321 posts)old news and a wee bit hyped at that, just keeping readers (like me) salivating for more information.
just to be clear: My position is pro-whistleblower, anti-authoritarianism, 'let the sunshine in' citizen/activist. 
