Astonishing, chilling piece by the Guardian’s Editor, Alan Rusbridger.

A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.”

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian’s reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government’s intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks – the thumb drive and the first amendment – had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. “We can call off the black helicopters,” joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

I’m not sure that this slide from the XKeyscore slide deck revealed by the Guardian has received the attention it deserves.

It says that one of the “anomalous” factors an NSA analyst might look for when deciding whether to drill down on someone is whether or not the person is using encryption (like PGP).

So… you can be a perfectly innocent, nay admirable, person like, say, Cory Doctorow, who encrypts his email simply to ensure that only he and the recipient can read it. But that fact alone might be sufficient to start an NSA check on all your communications.

This is one reason why the adjective “Orwellian” isn’t adequate for describing the mess we’re in. “Kafkaesque” is, if anything, even more apt.

Anthony Tommasini has an hilarious review of the current production of the Wagner Ring Cycle at Bayreuth by the German avant-garde director, Frank Castorf. When Castorf appeared on stage at the end, he was treated to a ten-minute orgy of booing. He stood there, unmoved and perhaps gratified. (After all, one of the pleasures of being avant garde is that one can annoy the bourgeoisie.) But that’s by-the-by. What I really wanted to say is that this passage from Mr Tommasini’s review made me laugh out loud:

Mr. Castorf’s deeper fault, it seems, was cynically to undercut the musical drama during some of the most romantic, poignant and heroic scenes. My earnest attempt to be open-minded about this baffling “Ring” almost foundered for good near the end of “Siegfried” when (you can’t make this up) a monster crocodile swallowed the poor Forest Bird in one big gulp.

This last scene, of course, is the ecstatic love duet between Siegfried, our rambunctious hero (who, by the way, instead of forging a sword assembles a semiautomatic rifle), and the smitten Brünnhilde. In this production, at the most climactic moment in the music, the stage rotated to reveal two of those monster crocodiles busily copulating.

Looking hungry after sex, the squiggling reptiles, their jaws flapping, headed toward Siegfried and Brünnhilde, who were singing away.

As the reptiles crawled closer, the Forest Bird, presented here as an alluring young woman (the soprano Mirella Hagen), burst upon the stage to save the day. Of course, the Forest Bird was not supposed to be in this scene, but who cares what Wagner wrote? This fetching Forest Bird bravely fought off one crocodile by jabbing a pole down its throat. But the other one opened wide and swallowed her whole. Throughout, Siegfried and Brünnhilde seemed only mildly concerned. But then, in Mr. Castorf’s staging, they also seemed only mildly concerned with each other, a much bigger problem.

Well worth reading in full.

As readers of this blog will know, I have a low opinion of LinkedIn, which I consider to be one of the most annoying, intrusive and useless online services in existence. (See here and here, for example.) So today, after yet another of my hapless connections had “endorsed” me for something for which I had never requested an endorsement I finally got round to deleting my account. The ensuing dialogue box contained this interesting information.

The second bullet-point has a vaguely menacing tone. Does it imply that someone else can use my email address(es) to open a (fake) LinkedIn account in my name? Or is it simply saying that I can always think again and use my email address to get back in?

Who said satire was dead? The NSA Can’t search its employees’ emails.

The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. 

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.

A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person,” rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.

Now the question is: do you believe the NSA’s answer?