Partner of Guardian's Snowden Reporter Detained Under Terrorism Act

hydrofix writes "The partner of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programs by the National Security Agency (NSA), was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through the Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro. David Miranda was stopped by officers and informed that he would be questioned under the Terrorism Act 2000. The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations last under an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours. Miranda was released without charge, but officials confiscated electronics including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles. 'This is a profound attack on press freedoms [...] to detain my partner for a full nine hours while denying him a lawyer, and then seize large amounts of his possessions, is clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and GCHQ,' Greenwald commented."

Comments

Re:Update the constitution

[Anonymous Coward]

Since this is the UK, it's the Magna Carta that needs to be revised.

Re:Waiting..

[Anonymous Coward]

For all the Miranda rights jokes.. c'mon, get them out the way..

In the UK, you don't have Miranda rights.

It's up to you to decide if that's a joke or not.

"Partner"

[Anonymous Coward]

Call him boyfriend or spouse or something. Partner makes it sound like he might have been involved in the journalistic work (and detaining him would still be wrong).

Instead, they're targetting the journalist's relationships. It's absolutely despicable.

Re:"Partner"

[Psyborgue]

It's Glenn's own word! I'm in a civil union with my "partner" and I don't particularly mind this term. Although I agree it can be confusing, most of the time people get what you mean by context. When I marry him this November, i'll call him my "husband" but not before then. You can blame the homophobes for creating this dual tier of unions but it does exist and I might as well use the proper confusing term as much as possible to emphasize just how idiotic it was that until just recently I couldn't get married.

Re:"Partner"

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Partner makes it sound like he might have been involved in the journalistic work (and detaining him would still be wrong).

He is involved - he was returning from a trip to Berlin to work with Laura Poitras the documentary film-maker whom Snowden also reached out to. The trip was paid for by Greenwald's newspaper, the Guardian.

Re:Update the constitution

[Teun]

Please realise this is a country where they can and will detain you for not handing over the key for encrypted data.

Re:Update the constitution

[dkleinsc]

However, given that the UK likely violated the European Convention on Human Rights, GP is not entirely wrong. There's definitely an issue of how legal this all was, given that:
1. There was no suspicion that Mr Miranda committed a crime, which brings up Article 5.
2. The only reason to seize Mr Miranda's electronic devices was to search them, again with no reason to believe that they were used for a crime, violating Article 8.
3. The reason they picked Mr Miranda was because of his association with Glenn Greenwald, violating Article 11.
4. And what Glenn Greenwald did was covered under Article 10.

So yeah, Land of the Free, unless you embarrass important people or organizations in the US or UK or NATO.

Re:Update the constitution

[EmagGeek]

At least in the US, there is no limit to civil forfeiture. If authorities think that your possessions were used in a crime, they can take them even if you are never charged with a crime at all. This includes personal effects, possessions, and real property.

Re: Update the constitution

[Capsaicin]

Orwell wrote 1984 after beeing delusional on how the communists behaved during the Spanish civil war, where he inititially fought for the communists.

Orwell never fought for the actual Communists (i.e. the Russian aligned Communist Party), he fought for the POUM (which was a Trotskyist group). The exigencies of Russian foreign policy (Stalin wanted an anti-fascist alliance with Britain and France) caused the Communists to be the conservatives on the Republican side. For example, everywhere the Communists (as opposed to various Trotskyist and Anarchist groupings) gained control, factories which had spontaneously been "collectivised" by their work force were returned to the hands of the prior private owners.

The musn't upset bourgeois Britain and France line (the vanity of which reached it's denouement at the Munich conference) being pursued, at Stalin's behest, by the Communists in Spain was natural perceived by more radical leftists as a gross betrayal. Orwell saw it as such. Orwell too perceived the danger of the requirements of State taking precedence over the liberation of workers. I'm not sure how you think he was being "delusional?!" Disillusioned perhaps, but then he obviously didn't hold the Communists in high enough regard to fight with them in the first place.

I recommend reading his Homage to Catalonia, not only because it clarifies the meaning of works such as Animal Farm and 1984, but because it's a damn good read.