Comment by aspensmonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aspensmonster | Hacker News Reader

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>"...He's very likely carrying highly sensitive documentation from Snowden"

Given the extremely high profile nature of this entire scenario, I don't see how anyone on the case could expect the probability of Greenwald using his partner as a data mule to rank as "very likely." I'm not saying it's impossible. Just that anyone who's been paying attention for the last decade or so knows better than to travel with hardware across unfriendly borders like the US or the UK. They're just going to take it anyway and then you're out thousands of dollars of gear. Between Snowden and Greenwald and Poitras and The Guardian and Wikileaks, I'd sincerely hope that they'd be capable of utilizing dead drops online.

In my opinion, this "retrieving stolen property" argument is merely the parallel construction of the actual motivation: to intimidate journalism. They know perfectly well that the probability of Miranda carrying anything actionable on him is minimal. But that's not the point. That's the pretext. The point was to pressure cook him for nine hours in order to glean from him any useful tidbit of intel, with the understanding that even if nothing comes of it, they've sent a clear message to The Guardian that they're taking the fight to them personally.

I would have agreed with you before hand, but it turns out that Greenwald and the Guardian were using David Miranda as a data mule:

In an e-mail Monday to The Associated Press, Mr. Greenwald said that he needed material from Ms. Poitras for articles he was working on related to the N.S.A., and that he had things she needed. “David, since he was in Berlin, helped with that exchange,” Mr. Greenwald wrote.

...

Mr. Miranda told reporters in Rio that he had been subjected to deep questioning at Heathrow. “I stayed in a room, there were six different agents, entering and leaving, who spoke with me,” he said. “They asked questions about my whole life, about everything. They took my computer, video game, cellphone, memory thumb drives — everything.”

Mr. Greenwald said that all of the documents encrypted on the thumb drives came from the trove of materials provided by Mr. Snowden.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/europe/britain-detai...

And:

He had spent the previous week in Berlin visiting Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who has also been helping to disseminate Mr. Snowden's leaks, to assist Mr. Greenwald. The Guardian had paid for the trip, Mr. Greenwald said, and Mr. Miranda was on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald's investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden. The British authorities seized all of his electronic media — including video games, DVDs and data storage devices — and did not return them, Mr. Greenwald said.

Source: http://theweek.com/article/index/248385/the-miranda-mess

Having read that, I now believe the British were justified in detaining Miranda, though doing so for 9 hours was clearly excessive. What on earth was Greenwald thinking though letting his spouse, who lacks any kind of journalistic privilege, travel through the UK while carrying classified leaked NSA and GCHQ documents? It was foolish at best.

> Having read that, I now believe the British were justified in detaining Miranda, though doing so for 9 hours was clearly excessive.

Much of the controvery kicked off by this is that they used rights that are supposed to be used purely for direct terrorism-related investigations. As one of the Guardian articles so succinctly put it, this is absolutely unacceptable, unless somebody actually and officially declares journalism terrorism.

I agree, it was an abuse of law. But stopping and detaining him temporarily seems justifiable, especially as he is not a journalist, doesn't enjoy any protections other than the ones any normal travellers get and was carrying some of the leaked NSA docs.

In that light using the terrorism law and holding him for 9 hours was a brain dead move as well.

I agree that it was braindead, however, there is a great deal of deliberation involved. Any other form of "meeting" (to be grossly and dangerously euphemistic) would have involved lawyers and probably also consular assistance. A misuse (or, if you prefer, abuse) of anti-terror legislation is the only possible way to intimidate, interrogate and hold a foreign national who has not (and does not) currently commit a crime on British soil.

"Stopping and detaining" was exactly the one option British authorities could not use, because that would have put him outside the law-free zone that is the airport. That's why they chose another way, and that's why they get, perhaps unexpectedly, a great deal of backlash from this.

He was acting on behalf of a bona fide investigative journalist and his journey was paid for by The Guardian. That should be enough to afford him the same protection as a journalist.

What if he had not been the partner of GG, but instead just your average joe paid courier being paid for the delivery of primary source evidence to be used by the staff of the news organization? Would the contents of the package not enjoy the same protection that it would were it being carried by one of the new organization's journalists?

So as long as your encryption can hold up for nine hours you can travel via London.

The thumb drives would all have been cloned when first confiscated, which is why the 9 hour detainment was unnecessary and likely intimidation.

They could keep him longer if they were able to decrypt, assuming it was gov files.

on what grounds?

Indeed. I just finished reading the article on the guardian and my suspicions were certainly wrong. The guardian article

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-i...

indicates that David knew he was carrying data, but not what it was. The NYT article

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/europe/britain-detai...

has Greenwald confirming that David was facilitating the exchange between himself and Poitras of NSA documents.

I shake my head at the matter and wonder why they didn't just use dead drops. Though I wouldn't say this justifies their use of anti-terrorism legislation to perform an extra-judicial shakedown of an individual working in the service of journalism. Free speech is a fundamental human right, not a privilege. One does not need to receive a paycheck from a newspaper to be a journalist or do journalism, nor even be the point man speaking, for journalism is merely the act of speaking informedly to the public at large. Whether you're the final writer, or the editor, or the source, or the courier delivering mail everyday, you're in the service of journalism if the end product is such speech. Any attempt to interfere with that process is repulsive, no matter where in the chain the authorities choose to strike. Sadly though, it seems free speech is not held in very high regard in most parts of the world.

So there's two possible reasons for them stopping him and both are kind of pathetic. One, that stopping someone for 9 hours in Heathrow really amounts to much intimidation of anything. I mean it's wrong and wrong headed but I struggle to buy that someone with half a brain thought this would be at all intimidating. I mean this is England for crying out loud. They probably spoke loudly at him and refused him tea.

So I lean toward they really wanted to see if they could find anything on him directly or indirectly that would help them get to all those documents Greenwald is now saying he'll release. But I understand that most people will chose between these two reasons and it's hard to prove one or the other.

I would caution against presuming that nine hours of detention in an interrogation room with a team of very well trained, highly motivated interrogators couldn't be extremely intimidating - regardless of location.

If nothing else, it's intimidating because if they can detain you under a terrorism law for doing journalism, it stands to reason that they can bend or abuse some other over-broad law to actually charge/imprison you depending on the interrogation. Also, you get to hand over every piece of electronics you're carrying for an indefinite period of time. If and when you get any of them back, you might as well assume they're bugged or otherwise compromised, so they're essentially useless unless you want to try your hand at finding any backdoors that might be there. Fun.

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