The partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist for The Guardian who has been publishing information leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, was detained for nine hours by the British authorities under a counterterrorism law while on a stop in London’s Heathrow Airport during a trip from Germany to Brazil. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/world/europe/britain-detains-partner-of-reporter-tied-to-leaks.html?hp&_r=0 David Michael Miranda, 28, is a citizen of Brazil. He had spent the previous week in Berlin visiting Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who has also been helping to disseminate Mr. Snowden’s leaks, to assist Mr. Greenwald. The Guardian had paid for the trip.
Mr. Miranda was told that he was being detained under Section 7 of the British Terrorism Act, which allows the authorities to detain someone for up to nine hours for questioning and to conduct a search of personal items, often without a lawyer, to determine possible ties to terrorism. More than 97 percent of people stopped under the provision are questioned for under an hour.
“What’s amazing is this law, called the Terrorism Act, gives them a right to detain and question you about your activities with a terrorist organization or your possible involvement in or knowledge of a terrorism plot,” Mr. Greenwald said. “The only thing they were interested in was N.S.A. documents and what I was doing with Laura Poitras. It’s a total abuse of the law.This is obviously a serious, radical escalation of what they are doing. He is my partner. He is not even a journalist.”
Ms. Poitras gave Mr. Miranda documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden. The British authorities seized all of his electronic media — including video games, DVDs and data storage devices — and did not return them.
Civil rights groups in Britain have criticized Section 7 of the Terrorism Act, accusing the authorities of using the provision to arbitrarily stop and detain travelers, particularly Muslims.
Brazilian authorities were outraged. Sergio Danese, the under secretary for consular affairs at Brazil’s Foreign Ministry, said Brazil’s consul general and embassy officials in London had worked to resolve the situation. In a statement, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry expressed “grave concern” about the incident, which it said was “without justification” since there could be no “legitimate” accusations that Mr. Miranda fell under the Terrorism Act.
Anyone detained must “give the examining officer any information in his possession which the officer requests”. Any property seized must be returned after seven days.
The Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, David Anderson QC, said it was very unusual for a passenger to be held for the full nine hours under this schedule and he wanted to “get to the bottom” of what had happened.
Mr Greenwald said the British authorities’ actions in holding Mr Miranda amounted to “bullying” and linked it to his writing about Edward Snowden’s revelations concerning the US National Security Agency (NSA).
He said it was “clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and (UK intelligence agency) GCHQ”.
“They never asked him about a single question at all about terrorism or anything relating to a terrorist organisation.
“They spent the entire day asking about the reporting I was doing and other Guardian journalists were doing on the NSA stories.”
Greenwald says he’s going “to write much more aggressively than before, I’m going to publish many more documents than before. I’m going to publish many more things about England, as well. I have many documents about the system of espionage of England, and now my focus will be there, too.
“I think they are going to regret what they did.”
Dirty Babylon 