1) They didn't want anyone else to get access to the material that the Guardian had but would not end up publishing;
2) The rules said that that's what they had to do, so they did it;
3) That's all they could do on "their patch", so CYA;
4) A little intimidation would never go amiss, surely...
Backups are hard - if there was even a slight chance that they destroyed the only copy of something, why not go ahead with it? They're not that stupid.
I sense the Guardian piece doesn't tell the whole story.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-m...
"As Gestapo chief of operations and later (after 1939) its chief, Müller played a leading role in the detection and suppression of all forms of resistance to the Nazi regime.[12] Under his leadership, the Gestapo succeeded in infiltrating and to a large extent destroying the underground networks of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party by the end of 1935."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_M%C3%BCller_%28Gestapo...
1984 was neither prophetic nor cautionary; it was merely descriptive.
This would more accurately portray the threat that they pose -- they're people in charge of running the world, and their backwards notions of how the world should operate will lead us down a very dark hole of no return. They need to be stopped quickly.
Largest UK companies (that seemed recognizable): HSBC, Shell, BP, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever, Vodafone, Anglo American (thought the name was funny for a huge British company), Prudential, Coldplay
Edit: Added services
Edit 2: Added list of largest UK companies
Edit 3: Added Coldplay
Here is a story about exports to repressive regimes, this bit alone is troubling, and a believe it's just a fraction of exports. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blood-money-uk...
