The White House has said that it would not be "appropriate" for the US government to destroy leaked government secrets obtained by media organisations in the way ordered by the British government.

"It's very difficult to imagine a scenario in which that would be appropriate here," said White House deputy spokesman Josh Earnest on Tuesday.

Earnest's statement was the first made by the Obama administration after Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger disclosed that the British government insisted that the Guardian surrender or destroy computers containing classified information provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

"You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back," Rusbridger quoted a senior British official, whom he did not name, as telling him.

Rusbridger said he opted to destroy computers containing the data about widespread and secret surveillance in order to continue reporting on the issue, rather than being drawn into a legal battle that the Guardian would be unable to report.

Copies of the Snowden data are already in the hands of the Guardian's American operation, where reporting on the National Security Agency and the British surveillance agency GCHQ will continue.

The United States provides greater legal protections for journalism than the UK does. Earnest did not say such destruction was impossible to imagine.

US government destructions of inadvertently released and disseminated classified material are rare, but they have occurred.

During a court battle over the frozen assets of a now-defunct Islamic charity, al-Haramain, the government in 2004 accidentally released to al-Haramain's lawyers a document that apparently indicated the NSA had surveilled the charity without a warrant and passed a record of the surveillance to the Treasury Department, apparently contributing to the asset freeze.

A court in Oregon kept the document in a secure facility. Years later, following lengthy litigation in multiple venues, Justice Department officials in California used a table leg and a chair leg in 2007 to destroy a laptop computer containing a court brief that described the document.

Earnest declined to criticize the British government, Washington's closest foreign ally.

Saying that he did not know more about the data destruction beyond what has been reported, Earnest said it was "hard for me to evaluate the propriety of that."

American media watchdogs have described the coerced destruction of copies of the Snowden data as deeply problematic for the freedom of the press.

The Guardian "has been threatened by its own government with prior restraint and had its hard drives smashed in its basement to make a (stupid) point," wrote Ryan Chittum in the Columbia Journalism Review.

"This is police-state stuff. We need to know the American government's role in these events – and its stance on them – sooner rather than later."