Slashdot Mirror
Info Leak Wars To Get Messier
jfruh writes "As we discussed this weekend, David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, was detained while transporting encrypted data on the Snowden affair from Berlin; all his electronics were seized. Over at the Guardian offices, British police destroyed more of the newspaper's hard drives. Privacy blogger Dan Tynan sees where this one is going: reporters like Greenwald are going to stop even bothering to be circumspect with their revelations. Sorting through the contents of such infocaches to redact sensitive information just gives the government time to track you down. Eventually, the information will just be dumped online, warts and all, as soon as someone who wants the information public gets ahold of it."
Geebus, the factual errors on these summaries are becoming eye-watering!
The Guardian destroyed the laptop and the hard drive rather than turn them over. Shit, the title of the article has that in it:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london
I consider it a brave act of defiance on the part of the Guardian, good for them. It won't affect the fact that there's probably stashed copies of this stuff everywhere but the British Authorities wanted the actual hardware, so rather than give it to them they used an angle grinder themselves.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Yes, the government says they have nothing to hide BUT their actions scream "We have metric shit loads of things to hide". Things are going to get "interesting" in the next few years. It would be best if people started being more paranoid and start learning how to drop off the grid. We here in the west spent 40 years in a cold war with the Soviet Union. Some of the lessons that were learned on how to conduct activities while dealing with those guys, eg. Moscow Rules, would be instructive to those peoples and groups the government is and will be going after. Google the phrase, "Green in the new Red"
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Considering this news...
Sorry, We're British -- No Miranda Rights!
But they have taken legal action.
Letter from Miranda's attorneys
Even if you don't agree with Miranda's position, the letter is still worth reading, as it lays out the facts in meticulous detail.
He was detained, not arrested, under section 7 of the Terrorism Act.
Part of the point of this is that not having been arrested, he did not have the rights of a suspect who has been arrested.
However he was _required_ to answer all questions, no matter how irrelevant to a case, asked by the police.
Also remember he wasn't entering the UK. He was transiting from Germany to Brazil. So, relevance to a crime?
this was about intimidation, pure and simple.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
All the Snowden data is stored in a safe place outside the UK (and the US of course) according to the people at The Guardian. This is standard procedure for all sensitive information and this was also the case with the exclusive parts of the Wikileaks material. They told the intelligence agents this but they didn't care and proceeded to destroy only the local storage media. So stupid!
The data is out there. It cannot be removed or contained in any way. This is how it is in this day and age, and this is a good thing. Information still wants to be free.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --