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Sharp.

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.

Also note that this wasn't the US government; it was the British state, which for the past decade seems to have based its foreign policy obsessively on playing Mini-Me to the USA's Dr. Evil.

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.)

With a little luck time will tell. It would be too much to hope for a leak.

> (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.

This is actually the 2nd salvo. Glenn Greenwald basically made his opening statement in the negotiation for how this is going to go down in the NYT's profile of Laura Poitras:

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.”

I thought he baited the trap with that comment about how he was sending his partner encrypted files:

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.

It'd be interesting if the "interrogation" of suspected "terrorists" have to be video-taped, and then after the fact, released publicly for scrutiny.

I think audit trails and accountability (and the threat of punishment for those who abuse their power) will curtail such civil liberties abuses.

That's why there aren't any.

Records are usually kept. After all, that is what bureaucracies do. They keep records. Even if the government's action was technically legal, the UK legal system is pretty robust and independent, and the government is defeated in the courts all the time.

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.

> 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.

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

https://twitter.com/20committee

> 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.

He is a dick but he unfortunately has some ammo in the sense that the Guardian appears to have financed the trip. That still doesn't make what happened acceptable but it will assuage those who lean towards sympathizing with the NSA. The fact that Greenwald wasn't more forthcoming about this makes it even more difficult.

I don't see how that makes any difference, in fact if it makes a difference it makes it worse.

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.

Agree with this. There's a large measure of difference between detaining a private citizen (bad), and detaining somebody under the employ of a journalist organisation (far, far worse).

One is harrassment, the other is political intimidation in an attempt to censor.

In this day and age of blogging, everyone can be a journalist. Interesting fact - when the US constitution was written, the phrase "free exercise ... of the press" did not refer to news reporting, it referred to literal printing presses. Over time the phrase "freedom of the press" has been reduced to nominal news reporting agencies. But at the time it basically meant anyone mass-producing text.

    https://twitter.com/20committee

John Schindler is a homophobic and transphobic scumbag who recently joked about Greenwald being trans like Manning.

> Wikileaks has some of the shittiest OPSEC ever (as the Manning events showed)

I still have some hope that they are at least capable of learning from their mistakes.

> Wikileaks has some of the shittiest OPSEC ever (as the Manning events showed).

How did the Manning events show that?

As I recall it, one of their partner newspapers deliberately misunderstood how encryption worked, leaked their special passcode to one of the document archives, and then pointed at Wikileaks for being shitty after themselves handing the keys to the unredacted documents to the world.

The partner newspaper was in fact The Guardian.

The reason this was a critical screwup is that wikileaks reused decryption keys with data they shared so when one person leaked their key, it was usable on many people's encrypted data.

> https://twitter.com/20committee

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.

Useful test for Greenwald and the Guardian too, no?

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.

I wonder how deep the game goes?

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?

Another possible pre-meditated outcome:

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.

The conservative base in the UK? If not then how do you see the link, he was held in the UK, not the US?

Globally, as this is a global story with global consequences (the entire NSA scandal, not just this part of it).

The political elite in the UK has a somewhat different relationship with the "base" than the political elite in the US does. It is a much, much, much smaller country, and the difference in size makes a real difference to the way that the machinery of politics operates.

He was already out, no?

No doubt, but this is the first time I've heard of it. Before it was just a random fact about Greenwald, now it's splashed all over the media, in people's faces.

> As some mentioned in the comments, even the Mafia has basic engagement rules to leave family members alone.

That was actually mentioned in the article.

like my doctor used to like job about the differences between terrorists and the government, at least you can negotiate with the terrorists.

hopefully people are finally coming to that realization that the common quip about the government treating itself as above the law is actually true

Whether it will backfire or not is up to the citizens to decide. But I suspect it won't backfire enough to cause a dent.

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).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DA-Notice

Well it hasn't stopped the Guardian or even the Daily Mail, it seems ;-) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2396745/Edward-Snowd... .. I could never have thought I could hold up the Mail as a good source :-)

"I could never have thought I could hold up the Mail as a good source :-)"

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.

No, I think they just screwed up. Don't assume these intelligence services people are intelligent and have thought through all the angles, especially in the UK.

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.

Wasn't this an action by the UK? It seems that you have quietly slipped over into complaining about the White House, which is not in the UK.