With two British spies supervising, three employees of the Guardian used angle grinders and a drill to destroy three laptops containing the files leaked to the news organization by Edward Snowden.
The Guardian, on Friday, released new video footage of the destruction, which took place in the basement of the company's London headquarters on July 20 — about a month-and-a-half after the first report based on the Snowden files. Even knowing the Guardian had copies of the files overseas, the British government threatened the paper with an injunction and sent two technicians from GCHQ, Britain's NSA counterpart, to watch the computers being destroyed.
See also: Edward Snowden: Mission Accomplished, 'I Already Won'
"It was purely a symbolic act; we knew that, GCHQ knew that and the government knew that," said Paul Johnson, deputy editor for the Guardian. "It was the most surreal event I have witnessed in British journalism."
It took three hours of what the Guardian described as "hot, sweaty work" to completely destroy the computers. They then fed the pieces into a degausser, a high-tech piece of equipment provided by GCHQ to destroy magnetic fields and erase data.
"It's harder to smash up a computer than you might imagine," Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said in the video.
The Guardian has continued to publish reports based on secret documents Snowden leaked, including one earlier this week charging the GCHQ and NSA with harvesting data from smartphone apps.
"I was completely clear with the cabinet secretary that there were copies of there were copies [of the files] elsewhere, and that the destruction of these computers wasn't going to stop reporting," Rusbridger said.
Check out the video embedded above for footage of the computers' destruction.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.