British Newspaper Has Advantages in Battle With Government Over Secrets

Having gone global and remained free to readers on the Web, with a newsroom in New York as well as in London, The Guardian is a much harder news organization than most to intimidate or censor, as the British government, with no written Constitution or Bill of Rights to enshrine protections of free speech, has discovered.

But the tale of the last two months, as The Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger tells it, at least, is an extraordinary one of attempted political interference. Agents of the British government descended on The Guardian’s offices to monitor three executives as they physically destroyed computer hard drives containing some of the classified material that Edward Snowden downloaded from American intelligence databases and gave to Glen Greenwald and others. “You have powerful protections in America that we don’t,” said Rusbridger. In conversations with him, the British government threatened the paper with “prior restraint,” he said, to stop it from publishing material, and then demanded that The Guardian return or destroy the classified material it was holding.