[junto]

It is also a bit of a "fuck you" statement as well though.

UK Ministry of Defence as well as the Security Services have a policy of drilling hard drives if a machine is leaving their control.

I heard a story, which I think came from Dell, who had a machine sent to them from the MOD because it had intermittent trouble booting. Standard practice was that the drives were drilled before the server was sent to Dell in Ireland. When the engineers tried to boot the server it of course wouldn't boot. When they pulled out the drives they were drilled. Report was inconclusive.

Thus the Guardian's were quasi-mimicking the MOD. I.e. taking the piss.