“Now… destroying RAM? Circuit boards, etc, etc? Nope. Not even remotely plausible. Straight out intimidation”
“GCHQ: “No destroy the whole thing”
Guardian: “Why all the data is only on the drive?””
Oh come on, you guys are cleverer than that 
Off the top of my head, places to store code / data / anything if you’re willing -
Physical drives (external - usb, removeable -cd, internal - hd)
RAM, inc main memory, on video card or any other component (network cards,etc)
Cache in CPUs.
ROM - bios or wherever.
So basically theyve destroyed anything that could ever concievably hold any data whatsoever - permanently or temporarily, easy or a little harder to access ( http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/cryogenically-frozen-ram-bypasses-all-disk-encryption-methods/900 ), doubt they were in the mood to discriminate. Better safe than sorry, i guess. And good luck building a pc that only stores data on the hd…
