Journalist’s partner held for 9 hours ‘had secret files’
A JOURNALIST’S boyfriend who was detained at Heathrow for nearly nine hours was carrying top secret US government documents, it was claimed last night.
Police used counter-terrorism powers to stop and question David Miranda and seized computer memory sticks he was carrying.
The Brazilian is the boyfriend of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who yesterday claimed that the detention of his partner on Sunday was designed to ‘send a message of intimidation’.
Mr Greenwald has written at length about the activities of British and US electronic spying agencies from documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a former CIA technician.
The documents provided by Snowden were reported by The Guardian, amid great fanfare, as showing the extent of ‘mass surveillance’ by Washington. It claimed the US National Security Agency had ‘direct access’ to the servers of leading internet companies. The paper also published details of spying operations carried out by Britain against foreign governments.
But critics questioned the merit of claims which, they said, amounted to nothing more than that ‘ spies had been engaged in spying’.
Yesterday the New York Times reported that Mr Miranda, who was returning from Berlin, had been in Germany to deliver, and collect, documents from the Snowden cache, which had been encrypted and stored on portable hard disks. He spent the previous week there with a documentary filmmaker, Laura Poitras, who has been working on the Guardian’s stories about the NSA and Britain’s monitoring centre, GCHQ.
Later editions of The Guardian yesterday made clear the newspaper had paid for Mr Miranda’s flights.
The Heathrow incident provoked a row over the powers contained in Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act which were used to detain Mr Miranda, 28, who was questioned without access to a lawyer, and whether the actions threatened legitimate journalism.
After the claim that Mr Miranda had been carrying secret US documents, former Tory MP Louise Mensch described him as a ‘classified data mule’, and wrote on Twitter: ‘So it emerges the “spouse held to intimidate” story spun by Greenwald and the Guardian is a total and utter lie.’
She defended the use of the counter-terror powers, saying: ‘Knowing that our agents were able to retrieve some encrypted Snowden data from Miranda reinforces the importance of the Terrorism Act.’
But Bob Satchwell, of the Society of Editors, said it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the move was an attempt to intimidate a journalist.
Labour MP Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, wrote to police asking whether the questioning of Mr Miranda was carried out at the request of the US government. The White House last night denied that was the case.
The official reviewer of terrorism laws, David Anderson, QC, said he had asked the police for a briefing about the case, and repeated his calls for the law to be reformed.
Mr Greenwald claimed the detention of his boyfriend was designed to ‘send a message of intimidation’. He added: ‘I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England too. I have many documents on England’s spy system. They will be sorry for what they did.’
Mr Miranda said ‘six different agents ... asked questions about my entire life. They took my computer, video game, mobile phone, my memory card. Everything’.
The Brazilian government said his detention was a matter of ‘grave concern’. The Guardian said it was ‘dismayed’ at the incident.
Tory MP David Davis, the former shadow home secretary, said: ‘This is absolutely not solely an operational matter for the police. This relates directly to Press freedom.’
A Home Office spokesman said: ‘Schedule 7 forms an essential part of the UK’s security arrangements. It is for the police to decide when it is necessary and proportionate to use these powers.’