There's a huge leap between having access to pins and actually accessing data. Even talking to unknown i2c devices requires some experimentation. Even if there

There's a huge leap between having access to pins and actually accessing data. Even talking to unknown i2c devices requires some experimentation. Even if there was a clear channel through which you could access data over i2c (I'm not aware of any consumer bulk storage device which makes data available over i2c), doing that covertly in a short period of time while giving pretences that you're destroying the device would be practically impossible. GCHQ employees aren't magicians. I suppose it's possible that the guardian hid all the secret data in i2c eeprom chips which happened to be on their motherboard. "Possible" in the very remotest sense. You'd need to be pretty knowledgeable in digital electronics to even approach that successfully. I suspect it's more likely that GCHQ have a list of ICs which can store data, and to be safe they are required to destroy them all.