Taking into account that the UK law enforcement and Brazil have a bit of a history when it comes to labelling people terrorist wrongly makes it even worse.
Taking into account that the UK law enforcement and Brazil have a bit of a history when it comes to labelling people terrorist wrongly makes it even worse.
1) A test to see how the journalist will react and to flush out more information. I.e. force him to disclose more information so they know what he has.
2) Another test is to test public opinion. So far we have seen nothing but defensiveness and accusations from the White House. That bill to de-fund the NSA had some legs but didn't get off the ground. If there is no reaction that is a good benchmark, they don't have to stop and do anything. They could even push the envelope further and probably not get an real repercussions.
3) A warning is a powerful thing. It is message to all other journalists working with NSA sources. "Are you prepared to open your family to harassment, black lists and 9 hour detentions during travel?". As some mentioned in the comments, even the Mafia has basic engagement rules to leave family members alone. That tells one the level of engagement and the mentality of government actors we are dealing with.
I do think this is driven by fear and incompetence rather than malice but you could easily be right. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the various offices dealing with the fall-out from this, especially the interface boundary between the foreign affairs and the anti-terror branches.
Quite possibly the idea of detaining Mr. Miranda originated from an overzealous busy-body relatively low in the hierarchy. Or perhaps it's merely meant to look like that.
(I discount the gay smear argument. It might play in the US, but here in the UK there are/have been out-of-the-closet gay Conservative cabinet ministers.)
Somewhat surprisingly, I don't think it plays in the US anymore either. I have heard fairly little about either Greenwald or Manning's GSM status. The media has made more of a deal with Snowden and his "pole dancing" ex-girlfriend.
Read the middle of the last page: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...
> Their discussion turned to the question of coming back to the United States. Greenwald said, half-jokingly, that if he was arrested, WikiLeaks would become the new traffic cop for publishing N.S.A. documents. “I would just say: ‘O.K., let me introduce you to my friend Julian Assange, who’s going to take my place. Have fun dealing with him.’ ”
> Poitras prodded him: “So you’re going back to the States?”
> He laughed and pointed out that unfortunately, the government does not always take the smartest course of action. “If they were smart,” he said, “I would do it.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/25/greenwald-s...
“When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in Rio via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents,” Greenwald said. “I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it’s connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists.”
After that his partner was definitely in play and that set the stage for todays (or yesterday, depending on where you live) action.
I think audit trails and accountability (and the threat of punishment for those who abuse their power) will curtail such civil liberties abuses.
Mr Miranda should consult a qualified lawyer: There will likely be several good ones who would do the work pro bono, to explore avenues whereby he can seek redress.
At the very least, it will cost the government (significant quantities of) time and money in legal expenses, and may cause them to think twice about using such tactics in future.
That was actually mentioned in the article.
hopefully people are finally coming to that realization that the common quip about the government treating itself as above the law is actually true
Useful to run this partner through an airport with some clean electronics to see what the reaction would be and to perhaps see how far the British are prepared to go to please our Us masters.
That test of public reaction, it can go two ways.
Imagine if the confiscated electronics contained as-yet unreleased documents describing abuses of "anti-terror laws" by UK authorities - in similar ways to the evidence-laundering revelations in the US?
4) Highlight the fact that Greenwald is in an openly gay relationship in an attempt to discredit him / colour what he's saying in a personal light. Sadly, a large part of the conservative base will cling to this I think.
Maybe in the US, but this is unlikely to make a ripple in the British public sphere.
The Snowden story has not been a big deal here and today's news has not had much airtime either (it's not even on the BBC News front page). The majority of Brits don't know about this story, nor are likely to have the context to care if they did.
Issues of UK-US cooperation, even over matters as worrying as extraditing Brits to the US for trial, rarely stir up great feelings amongst everyday folk. Being on Twitter and HN, I do know about this story and I still don't care for it much (in terms of how I consider British policy).
It's a struggle for me to even vaguely consider the Mail as a good source but they do seem to needle the government over certain things the others won't touch. I'd imagine because they feel they have such a swing over a large proportion of the main voter base for the UK they feel like they can get away with things that a lesser newspaper would be dragged over the coals for.
I think they already know through a post event review of MicroSoft's built in auditing logs. My understanding is that Snowden was a low level Windows admin that copied stuff that was either 1) in transit through a Microsoft Sharepoint server 2) anything he could find by roaming around the intranet. The NSA disclosed that he started grabbing documents when he was working as a contractor under Dell. They said he was aggressively exploring the limits of his network access and announced that 1) documents on their intranet would from now on be encrypted 2) that they would drastically reduce the number of system and network (as in Microsoft misuse of the term) administrators.
Plus, Wikileaks leaked an AES256 encrypted insurance file that presumably is everything that have from Snowden. Wikileaks has some of the shittiest OPSEC ever (as the Manning events showed). So, we know that they probably used openssl for the encryption and that the STK string is probably a sentence, or a few sentences, from a seminal published book about liberty/privacy. The NSA has probably already cracked the insurance file key. So, if they don't have the Manning portfolio from audit logs, they probably have it from Wikileaks.
There's an ex-NSA NWC guy that is putting out a lot of excellent information on this whole thing: 20committee
Wow that guy is a dick. Tons of FUD and highly partisan cheerleading, and some pretty sad troll responses (though I'm sure he gets a lot of troll attention, which does wear down a person's reasonableness).
I can understand that someone may have a different view on the balance between liberty and security, but his view is hyperbolic, not informative.
Detaining partner of journalist -> bad.
Detaining newspaper employee, possibly journalist -> very bad.
Once journalists will feel that they are in danger of no longer being free to do their reporting this story will get a lot more attention than it does at the moment.
One is harrassment, the other is political intimidation in an attempt to censor.
https://twitter.com/20committee
John Schindler is a homophobic and transphobic scumbag who recently joked about Greenwald being trans like Manning.I still have some hope that they are at least capable of learning from their mistakes.
How did the Manning events show that?
John Schindler is only a source of "excellent information" on this case in the sense that Ann Coulter provides "excellent political commentary". What a total joke.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER
The people who really benefitted from this action are Greenwald, The Guardian and those of us who want our governments to stop abusing their power. The UK government just look like assholes again. This will spawn further news stories in places like The Guardian as the legal fallout from this continues thereby keeping the surveillance state in the news cycle longer.
I don't think it was a coincidence that Greenwald was contacted when Miranda was detained. Whoever made the decision is playing a PR game, and wanted this to be in the news.
He was not, it was 3 hours later.
But, you know that can go both ways. Maybe the caller was sympathetic to Miranda's situation but his hands were tied by the bureaucracy and all of his fellows who were less-than-sympathetic? By alerting Greenwald he let someone else without anything to lose take action. Maybe the reason he wouldn't give out his name is because he didn't want to face internal reprisals, but he had to give his serial number because of policy so he went by the book.
I'm just saying that with such little information we have so far, it is a real rashomon situation. Also, hanlon's razor.
Greenwald sends his husband all the way to Berlin and back to meet with Poitras? And he's allegedly (from some headlines this weekend) carrying all the Snowden documents? Wouldn't Greenwald already have this? Why would he send his husband and not some unknown person that was probably under the radar?
And obviously the US/UK is trying to let the Snowden/Assange group know that their every step is being watched. I'm also guessing Poitras' safe house in Berlin is now not as safe anymore.
This is like watching a spy novel unfold in real life. I can't wait for the book that eventually explains everything that is currently happening.
As for what they're trying to accomplish... that seems like a fun thing to speculate about over drinks :)
Well, it's not like the Guardian is really terribly popular amongst bigots, anyway... If he wrote for the Daily Mail I could see your point.
Glenn reported on the NSA leaks. Glenn is gay. Everything gays do is wrong, therefore reporting on the NSA leaks is wrong. Also, supporting gays is bad, because someone might think you're gay. Therefore supporting NSA leakers is bad.
Where Glenn works is irrelevant. The NSA probably wants to discredit everyone involved, and garner as much support for themselves as they can.
Discrediting gay people because they are gay is losing its power even in the US.
The only prominent politician I can think of who pushes that line is Nick Griffin, and he's literally a nazi.
But yeah, it's not easy to imagine how such decisions are made. Of course, it's one of the features of authoritarianism that the display of authority trumps "tactical mistakes". But it's people who give such orders, not "authoritarianism". The simplistic explanation would be to state they're "pissed off". But maybe reality is quite close to that. By arresting Greenwald's partner, the UK authorities primarily demonstrate, to themselves, that they still hold certain powers -- and I wouldn't underestimate the self-motivational dimension of such a demonstration.
yes. the power to be subservient to the US twisted domestic politics.. (a US colony perhaps??)
FWIW, this sort of behavior was expected from the UK and US authorities. They did the same to @ioerror and will likely do the same to any individual who is seen as challenging the interests of the US and UK intelligence organizations.
If you've de-cloaked yourself as an investigative apparatus that's dedicated to exposing the secrets of folks who expressly do NOT want their secrets exposed, you should expect no less.
Why would this be a tactical mistake? The general public DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK. The government(s) know(s) this quite well.
If you think for a second that detention of associates of political enemies matters to an electorate far more interested in the minutiae of Kanye West's baby, you're living in a fairy land of your own making.
It's naiveté at the highest level to think that any meaningful proportion of the electorate cares, and that a single thing will change. If anything, the State now has tacit permission to press even further down the road of dystopia.
We live in a highly insular world in which our ideas are echoed by like-minded people. In such a world, it's easy to make the mistake of assuming that the broader populace is similarly like-minded. The reality, however, is that so long as sufficient bread and circuses are provided, nobody will care nearly as much as you or I do.
The second option is equally unpleasant, but for different reasons. We would require a total and catastrophic economic collapse, such that bread and circuses can no longer be affordably provided and such that the populace becomes sufficiently uncomfortable to actually start giving a shit. THIS solution is also not advisable, since such scenarios don't offer options to guide who is elected in the place of the devil we know. The transition from the Weimar to the Third Reich offers a valuable, and scary, precedent here.
Since both of the above are unpalatable, my solution is to drink heavily and bitch endlessly on the internet while still enjoying my comfortable life.
FFS don't talk nonsense and if you must don't do it here.
People overestimate the impact of the Internet, but they also underestimate it; I have a suspicion that the dissolution of traditional mass media will make it easier for interest groups to influence the public sphere via social networks, using propagation techniques similar to those that Upworthy is currently harnessing. That's what I find fascinating about Upworthy: using social media marketing strategies to sell ideas instead of products.
There is a legal solution. Courts may yet declare this unconstitutional.
Then there is a voting solution. People voted for Obama because he promised to get rid of all this. As Bush said fool me once, you cant fool twice. So people might in 2016 elect someone who has a record of being against these measures.
Plenty of solutions before a violent revolution. See for example the transition from The McCarthy era.
FWIW, the nephew of a very close friend of mine mentioned the topic of Snowden to me. He's a former army ranger, just recently mustered out and now going to veterinary school. He thought Snowden was a hero. His mom, who basically owns a few gas stations, has been very pro Assange and Bradley Manning for years and I'm sure is also paying a decent amount of attention to Snowden's story.
I've had quite the opposite experience so far. Most of the non-tech people I met recently on buses, shops etc. seemed to understand the problem very clearly and they cared. People cared about the issues at hand and quite intensely at that.
True that the majority seems silent, but deep inside almost everyone expressed a kind of hatred towards the 'O-force'.
Let's not misunderstand people because each one of us wants to hear positive news everyday. Stuff like Kanye's baby. This is not an unexpected behavior because ordinary people like us really want only one thing: Not being hassled by assholes.
In my opinion most of the times people are in pursuit of happiness and that is also, mark my words, the sole reason why people voted the O's to power in the first place. Let's not underestimate the power of people and lose hope altogether. It's much quicker to fall downhill than to climb high in the trust game of politics. Ever wondered how many people still dislike the bygone Bush?
Astrophysicists, mathematicians, and scientists, for the most part, don't read Hacker News. But they do read the Huffington Post. Some of them even are so clever they made these microwaveable-beef taquitos that always come out crunchy that I'm just about to snack on. They don't care about issues that directly affect their freedoms and liberty? The masses are unwashed?
Your corrosive cynicism isn't helping them care, nor is it furthering the debate any.
People may not be up in arms and shouting in streets now, but once the public opinion takes root in the mind, it would be hard to change come election no matter who promises what.
What catches my attention is the wide variety of reasons people have for carrying. Some are afraid that the government is going to use it to take away their guns, others are concerned about surveillance of GSM/LGBT activists, others are particularly disturbed by the NSA/DEA angle. One of those conversations was then followed up with a tirade about 9/11 and the moon landing... but the vast majority of people who are concerned by this are perfectly normal people.
The DEA partnership basically won over minorities, drug people, young people.
You could probably find ways to make this an anti-immigrant issue in general (spying on foreigners; obviously if you're Muslim or brown, but maybe it could somehow extend to Chinese immigrants too?)
Tech people hate it naturally. Business people (other than defense contractors) hate it because it makes doing business harder, particularly if you're doing business with Europe or other international business.
This abuse of Greenwald's lover might win over gay people.
Gun people were already super suspicious of the government since Sandy Hook w.r.t. registry and confiscation (honestly for the entire Obama administration, and even during Bush, and definitely during Clinton, too, but more so now)
Right wing people are suspicious due to IRS and general hatred of Obama. "NSA shares records with IRS" would be a great extension to the story, but even lawful IRS subpoena of electronic records supports the case for strong crypto under the control of the end user.
All we need is for NSA records to be used against Christians (pro life groups? I'm finding it hard to find ways NSA spying is specifically anti mainstream Christians) to essentially have 80% of people on the side of freedom, each for his own reason and maybe totally different from the others.
The only people left on the other side are die-hard militarists, defense contractors, and the political class, or people who are irrationally putting hypothetical safety over even their own liberty (I'd expect people to sacrifice unused liberty or the liberty of other people for their own hypothetical safety, always).
This is the demographic we need.
It may not be related, but we know first hand what its like to have the government entirely too "in the know" about your life. Not many of us are fans of it, even when it was arguably necessary to keep people alive.
From what I've seen so far, many people care, but not in the way we'd like. A surprising amount of people think along the lines of "If Greenwald/Snowden/etc are doing something wrong, maybe they shouldn't be doing it" or "If this makes me safe from terrorists, then I support it".
Don't underestimate the stupidity of the general populace. People are dumb and selfish and generally won't stand up against injustices unless it somehow directly affects them.
It'd be like giving a batter an extra swing. He'll probably miss, but there's no reason to give him the opportunity.
This has been news for two months now and it continues to be news. It affected US-Russia relations, its big in Brazil, Germany. There was a vote which almost succeeded in defunding the NSA. Ordinary people do care and opinion polls show it.
A lot of stories, like the LavaBit shutdown for example, never elicited the strong backlash that it should have. It was however, well known in security and technology media circles.
Because it is a slow(er) Sunday news morning, the reaction on twitter to this story has been quite intense, and that is translating into a huge amount of print and broadcast news stories.
If this was intended to intimidate journalists, that would have been achieved through the inevitable reporting in specialty blogs and twitter feeds of those intensely interested in the subject.
This controversy on the other hand, is blowing up in their face, which will result in reporters making the next 72 hours hell for the various authorities involved on both sides of the pond.
Either those changes are due to Snowden and then he should own up and show some of that transparency he's promised or he's lying through his teeth. Either way it is not looking good.
Probably need a citation for that. I didn't see such an assertion in his conference. In fact, he said "repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate".
"I don't care if Obama reads my text messages. All he'll learn is how to sext."
Most of the "smart" people I know, both in and out of the tech industry, are more interested in Egypt, Syria, and the large drop in US stock market indices last week.
How sad is it that Orwell's dire portrayal of Big Brother is no longer as relevant to most people as following reality TV's Big Brother...
So Orwell was a little paranoid... but Huxley was spot on.
Right now, in addition to this being the top story on HN, it is is on the default reddit front page at #9 and rising. It's also on the front page of the New York times website, and also in the top three headlines at news.google.com. Google reports 25 articles most being published in the last hour.
By these measures, it seems to me that a lot of people are rather interested in the story.
Now, I understand that you may not consider "the population that consumes its news on the internet" to be equivalent to the "general public". But any argument about that question is a much larger one than an argument about the public's interest in this particular story.
The fact is, even amongst all of the tabloid trash real news stories do matter to people, and people who consume cotton candy celebrity media for entertainment can also be consumers of hard news. The existence of one doesn't preclude interest in the other.
Edit: The Sun does, however, have boobs on its homepage, the Daily Mail talks about celebrities and the BBC's international site talks about Syria, Gibraltar and Usain Bolt, with its England page concerned with assisted suicide, a rider who died after a horse accident, something about climate activists and this gem: "Leicester Globe pub closes over anti-military rumours"...
Edit 2: Colour me impressed, the Telegraph not only reports on it on its frontpage, it also has an additional quote by an Amnesty International spokesperson. That's at least something, I suppose?
Now, along comes a situation which looks a lot like an attempt at journalistic suppression by the state. The incentive for the media to go along with any potential D-notice has evaporated because this is just censorship by other means, and if you're going to censor us anyway, why bother with D-notices? Issuing a D-notice over harrassing a journalist (via their family, in this case) would be something of a bodyliner, and I don't think even the British press would have a hard time figuring out what to do about it.
If anyone issued a super-injunction over this, the British media would see it as a challenge as to who could ensure the details were insinuated in such as way as to ensure the widest distribution.
You see it all the time. Go back to the very first HN discussions about PRISM and phonetapping and you'll see people swearing on their mothers life that nobody outside HN will ever care because it is just a 'nerd issue' or something.
I wrote to my MP, (Michael Gove) about this. While I disagree with him on many (if not most) things as an ex-journalist I hope he is unhappy with this.
It might be a well-planned tactical move: perhaps they wanted to enrage and provoke Greenwald, hoping he might make mistakes, accidentally disclose sources or additional material.
But yes, the most likely explanation is that they simply don't care, they abuse their power all the time and act like criminals, why should they respect people like Greenwald?
They can make an oxygen-sucking scandal out of nothing. This could devour the rest of Obama's second term if it gets out of hand (and the Republicans decide there's more mileage in beating him up about it rather than supporting the security state).
The public does not have to care for this to be a huge negative for the gov't. The only people who need to care are precisely the ones most likely to--folks rather like Greenwald.
The fact that you instantly jump to 'licking the boots of power' indicates to me that you don't tolerate any dissent from your views.
> They can make an oxygen-sucking scandal out of nothing. This could devour the rest of Obama's second term if it gets out of hand
This is not 'journalism'. This is blackmail.
I know you're trolling me here, but fuck it there probably are some halfwits out there nodding along with these power-worshiping redefinitions of old, well-understood law. From 18 U.S.C. § 873, blackmail: "Whoever, under a threat of informing, or as a consideration for not informing, against any violation of any law of the United States, demands or receives any money or other valuable thing, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned..." There's no money here. What is the "other valuable thing"? The safety of journalists' innocent loved ones? That's monstrous, and that isn't a proper interpretation of law.
No, the 'other valuable thing' in this case is immunity from search or seizure.
"Don't do this or I will harm your reputation" is blackmail. Not really a moral thing to be talking about doing.
In case anybody is wondering, the UK murdered a Brazilian man on the train with several bullets to the head after they explicitly identified him as a suspect and authorized his takedown. He had no ties to terrorism at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Meneze...
Some nameless official put anyone plausibly close to Snowden on one of however many "people of interest" type lists the UK has. It might even be a trickle down from some list in the USA. The original list may not even be intended as a "detain this person" list, but the way these secret lists work sourcing from other lists with different intents means the end result isn't necessarily the intended result.
Tyranny through bureaucracy basically. A little bit ironic what with the guy being Brazilian and Terry Gilliam's opus Brazil dealing with basically the same theme.
Any tech they seized is now being foresically analysed. He is unlikely to get it back.
They probably thought that it was highly likely he was a data mule between Greenwald and Poitras. I'd guess that they were probably right in that assumption.
I know a man, who knows a dog. I'll leave it at that.
If you're right, they screwed up, because they detained him on his trip back to Brazil. Any data he might have been carrying to Poitras he could have already delivered -- and I'm sure he would have been smart enough not to keep a copy.
1) Spend 9 hours pressing the guy in order to learn any details they are interested in. He was probably not prepared enough for that, most of people aren't. Apparently, in such an occasion you don't even have the "right to remain silent!" That is, Mr. David Miranda had no Miranda rights there. I guess they had a good laugh.
2) Get anything from the electronic devices. It's reasonable to expect that both GG and his partner aren't crypto security specialists (GG had problem even starting using crypto).
That they make the pressure to the journalists they saw as the added bonus. Obviously they don't expect that the "public" reacts much.
Note also that UK has laws where you have to give your passwords to the police.
2) Sure, but for that they didn't need to seize them, they could have copied them. I take it that Greenwald et al are smart enough to use an encrypted dead drop on the net rather than to hand-carry unencrypted bits with the keys in the head or the possession of the carrier.
From the government perspective I can see only bad stuff coming from this, it is a very clear abuse of the law, it will take a lot of tapdancing to explain this one away as a rogue employee.
Moreover, TSA already prepared the people to be numb about the inconveniences at the airports. It became hard to make news about that.
I wasn't aware that Brazilian citizens detained in the UK had rights granted by the US.
For better or worse, Glenn Greenwald is very skilled in these sorts of extended adversarial interviews. As a litigator in civil matters he would spend days being obstructionist in depositions. One of them, involving a dispute with Greenwald's former landlord runs over 500 pages. It was effective enough to get the opposing legal council fired.
So anyone who's working with Mr. Greenwald is probably much better prepared than the average Joe to spend 9 hours being questioned.
I personally suspect this was mostly about getting a look at the electronics Mr. Miranda was carrying. It's basic law enforcement strategy to realize targets will eventually make a mistake and for investigators to put themselves in a position to benefit from that.
I'm pretty sure that Greenwald and Miranda learned to be particularly careful about data integrity after that incident.
On one hand, it's obvious that bullying the partner of a famous journalist is going to get negative media attention.
On the other hand, maybe that's exactly what they want. Maybe they know these laws aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and that sort of media attention ensures that generations will know what happens when they start asking the wrong questions. "Hey kids, just look at what will happen to your family if you start questioning the laws we make to protect you."
Would Greenwald have done a better service if he hadn't told the world what happened to his partner? I don't know--but maybe.
Greenwald has basically been provoked into doing as much damage as he can do, likely he'll reveal more rather than less now. They have taken the gloves off against the one party that was still showing some restraint here.
Interesting how places like CNN don't cover this.
If this wasn't officially sanctioned from above there will be fall-out.
If anything, he's chuckling that he managed to provoke them to this kind of outrageous action. Rubbing his hands with glee. (Shades of "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!")
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/18/world/europe/greenwald-par...
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/19/world/europe/greenwald-par...
Definitely not. And in the end, nothing happened to his partner. His rights were violated, for sure -- but then ask other Brazilians for their experiences in the transit zone of London Heathrow. It's a pretty much lawless zone if you happen to hold the wrong passport.
So, no. More people than you think will be able to relate to this.
Given that David Miranda was transiting through the country, I would guess that the request originated from MI6, which would mean that the request was routed through the FCO, which would put William Hague in the hot-seat.
Helpfully, the Guardian has a list of senior civil servants here (although it is quite out of date):
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/jun/16/civil-s...
We could probably make some guesses as to which roles were involved in the decision. (Note: Civil servants only stay in a role for a limited period of time, so it is probable that the individuals named in the above list have moved on to new roles by now, and are not involved).
Speculating for a moment that he did give the OK to this, then I do not doubt that he did it with his eyes wide open. He would have known exactly what the PR repercussions were. There must have been a very good reason for him to want to stop Mr. Miranda - which means that it is unlikely to be simple intimidation. (Not the sort of thing that I can imagine your typical Whitehall civil servant stooping to in any case).
My guess is that it was believed that he was carrying a copy of Snowden's cache of documents, and the UK badly wanted to get their hands on a copy. Which is fascinating, if true, because it means that they still do not know what documents he has....
Fun to speculate ....
They are MUCH cleverer than this, it is likely to have been a deliberate provocation to try and get Greenwald to do something rash. It is also a sign that the gloves may be coming off.
I doubt very much if the police would do this off their own bat. What motive would they have to do so?
So it must have come at least from the Foreign Secretary, but more probably the Prime Minister.
The UK government is currently a coalition. The minor partner, the Liberal Democrats, tend to take a slightly more pro civil liberties line than the two big parties. Did they know about this beforehand? Will they kick up a fuss about it? (I suspect not, their leader is a spineless idiot).
What would you do if you were the head of the spy agency, and you think that Greenwald has information showing that you are spying on your own politicians?
Maybe. But if you've dug yourself into a hole, doesn't it make sense to stop digging?
> What would you do if you were the head of the spy agency, and you think that Greenwald has information showing that you are spying on your own politicians?
They have several options:
(1) Point out to the politicians that they agreed to it (which they probably did, if only passively)
(2) Kill Greenwald. Unlikely to work since Snowden has probably spread any documents widely around by now.
(3) Threaten Greenwald. Less publically than what they did.
(4) Use the information on the politicians to blackmail them into keeping quiet.
(5) Suggest to the politicians that the policy, though done for the right reasons (defence against terrorism, keeping in with the Americans, blah blah blah) may have gone too far and should now be looked into.
If it did, then clearly people in positions of power are happy to abuse them to hold that power.
If it did not, then it implies there is a whole shadow power structure so confident of their position that they are happy to do something like this knowing full well it would get publicity.
I wouldn't never, ever doubt the amount of sheer stupidity and arrogance of a Government.