Thursday 22nd August

The Snowden affair gets stranger and stranger.  Firstly the partner of the reporter to whom Snowden had passed the information is detained and questioned for nine hours and has all his electronic equipment confiscated, all under the prevention of terrorism umbrella.  And now it emerges that following threats from No. 10, the editor of ‘The Guardian’ had to witness the destruction of the hard drives by GHCQ which may have contained the files.

Don’t these idiots realise that no matter how many sledgehammers you bring down on computer hardware the information is out there already.  They are probably on several hard-drives already, and can be distributed so easily now by e-mail, or memory bar that the chances of actually destroying them are incredibly remote.

But far more important than that is the fact that we all know they (the Americans and GHCQ) are spying on us.  It comes as no surprise that they are, though what they are going to do to us as a consequence remains a mystery.  As Wikileaks has shown before, there is no hiding place on the internet, and no matter how many sledgehammers are used, no matter how many years poor Bradley Wiggins is forced to serve, no matter how many individuals are detained pointlessly at airports they will not be able to snuff out free speech quite that easily.

And the worse aspect of it all is that one suspects that the strings are really being pulled by the Americans, who seem to go to any lengths to prevent the dissemination of the TRUTH.