what utter nonsense, is being charged with a crime the same as guilt now? The article makes a point of repeatedly using the word alleged and citing that all the claims are from the prosecutor. It is extremely pernicious of you to use such language.
At this point, can we even be certain that that's safe? If the hard drives themselves have been compromised, what's to prevent them from copying out arbitrary data?
It's too late to keep encrypted copies of the data out of his adversary's hands - they'll have imaged everything as their first step - so presumably he's either doing this because there's data there he wants, or he's just being a pain in the ass over a few hundred bucks (or pounds) worth of hardware (and more power to him if that's what's really gong on!).
If _I_ needed data off those drives, I'd get a "burner" computer that's not connected to the internet or any sort of local network, plug the drives into that and decrypt them, then get those files off the machine in the least technical way possible - transcribe them by hand, take photos of the screen, print to a usb connected (burner) printer, if the data is too big for those sort of options (or binary blobs) I'd use a serial port connection to a second trusted machine.
Then I'd melt down the drives and the burner machine.
But mostly, I'd avoid becoming a target of the NSA's attention in the first place - if I were him I'd be suspicious of any hardware known or suspected by the NSA to be used by him ever. I'd assume supply chain exploitation of any new hardware with deeply embedded firmware/hardware layer exploits. I'd only ever use (for "private" purposes) 2nd hand hardware bought for cash from strangers... If you can get "targeted" for surveillance and exploitation just for occasionally using PGP and working at the wrong company (like the Gemalto guy from Thailand), how much scrutiny would you have to expect to live under if the US military thought you'd rooted their internal networks?
Glad I'm not him...
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/nsa-firmware-hacking/
I don't know if he's considered worth this much to "the authorities", but how'd you like _that_ done to your disks?
(If I'm reading that right, by non network connected burner machine would _probably_ be safe against that, but it's clearly half decade old NSA tech. Assuming their capability hasn't improve beyond that is ... foolish...)