I think most are agreeing that you are someone who is used to following the procedures of a state which habitually engages in surveillance.
I can believe you when you say "this is what had to be done".
The problem is all this seems orthogonal to the actual question asked by the article - "why these chips?"
Another important part of the Snowden revelations is that "no reason to be paranoid" is no longer a good argument. Every revelation has pointed to "everything the agencies might do to spy on, they in fact did do".
So if certain chips attracts the agencies attention, one might legitimately ask "why?"
I don't know anything about the focus on the chips in particular. I never did anything like that in my destruction and I cannot comment credibly on that part of the story.
I can only comment on why the magnetic media had to be destroyed. The how they went about is fair game for people on HN to speculate and question. I am not trying to stop anyone.
I also never said people should not be paranoid. I actually wrote a recent article saying that people should question their intelligence services. However, they also have a responsibility to read the answers that are provided via legislative and parliamentary vehicles.
If the majority of the HN audience were invited to a tour of GCHQ, given free reign to explore and then access to the myriad databases and tools - they would be bored within hours, look up and say
"Now take me to the real secret stuff."
It honestly is not that exciting. It is just a massive bureaucracy with various departments, some of which are doing bleeding edge stuff. When it comes to security it is all very routine and in line with standardised frameworks.
I think most are agreeing that you are someone who is used to following the procedures of a state which habitually engages in surveillance.
I can believe you when you say "this is what had to be done".
The problem is all this seems orthogonal to the actual question asked by the article - "why these chips?"
Another important part of the Snowden revelations is that "no reason to be paranoid" is no longer a good argument. Every revelation has pointed to "everything the agencies might do to spy on, they in fact did do".
So if certain chips attracts the agencies attention, one might legitimately ask "why?"