For civil libertarians in the United States and England, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the practices of our own governments and the countries that we routinely denounce as authoritarian. An example of this confusion can be found in the outrageous arrest of the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian writer who brought the Snowden disclosures to light and a leading voice for civil liberties in the world. David Miranda, who lives with Greenwald, was taken into custody when passing through London’s Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro. He was held for nine hours and had his computer, cell phone and other equipment seized. Such stops can occur at the request of the National Security Agency and other agencies and are carried out under the abusive Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The case could also highlight possible surveillance of journalists in England and the United States.
The law allows police at airports, ports and border areas to stop, search, question and detain individuals for up to nine hours. Miranda, 28, was held obviously because he is the partner of Greenwald. Where 97% of people held under the law are held for less than an hour, they held Miranda for the full nine hours and confiscated his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.
Miranda was reportedly in Berlin to deliver Snowden related documents and to pass other documents from Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, back to Greenwald. The use of a loved one for such a function is obviously dangerous and most journalists avoid such involvement since the partner would not necessarily be protected as journalists. The documents were stored on encrypted thumb drives. Greenwald says that the police informed him of an intent to arrest Miranda.
Notably, one defense might have been that Miranda was acting in a journalistic activity as a courier for Greenwald but Greenwald is quoted as saying that Miranda is not a journalist. The use of a loved one for such a job would create a dangerous ambiguity. However, it is also clear that the government is targeting a journalist and trying to obtain records of a journalist. Given the history of the Obama Administration in putting reporters under surveillance, there is a reasonable basis to suspect that wiretaps or other forms of surveillance have targeted Greenwald. How did they know to search the partner of Greenwald? I am surprised to see a non-journalist tasked with such a job if these accounts are true. However, these questions still remain as to whether the U.S. government is working with England to target journalistic records.
England has fewer protections for journalists, particularly under its controversial Crown laws. However, even the United States uses enhanced powers at borders and airports. The Supreme Court has adopted different rules governing such stops. The Metropolitan Police released a statement that “[h]olding and properly using intelligence gained from such stops is a key part of fighting crime, pursuing offenders and protecting the public.” The crime in this case would involve disclosures made by someone viewed as a whistleblower to a journalist. Many view Greenwald as protecting the public in performing his journalistic role. Even if Miranda was not viewed as a journalist as Greenwald appears to confirm, he would be viewed as a courier for a known journalist. Such couriers however are usually employees or contractors associated with the media. That difference may have encouraged this action by intelligence officials.
Most people are assuming the English were carrying out the demands of the NSA. Part of the motivation may be the search of the computer records and devices though the length of time has been denounced as harassment. Some members of Congress have called for Greenwald’s arrest. He is responsible for embarrassing a growing number of politicians, including President Obama and leading Democrats, who continue to be caught in false or misleading statements to the public. Unable to convince the public to simply embrace warrantless surveillance and demonize Snowden, the government appears to have adopted a scorched earth policy.
To add to the abuse, Miranda was denied a lawyer as authorities rifled through his computer files and belongings. Greenwald got the message: “[It] is clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and GCHQ. The actions of the UK pose a serious threat to journalists everywhere.” It certainly does, in my view, constitute an attack on the free press and raises the image of virtual hostage taking by the government.
The only thing missing is a few Guy Fawkes masks, “Finger” police, and the smiling face of Minister Peter Creedy to make the scene complete. “Schedule 7” even sounds like something that only Alan Moore could come up with.
What is most striking about Schedule 7 is how it is virtually without any standard or check on authority:
Interpretation
1(1)In this Schedule “examining officer” means any of the following—
(a)a constable,
(b)an immigration officer, and
(c)a customs officer who is designated for the purpose of this Schedule by the Secretary of State and the Commissioners of Customs and Excise.
(2)In this Schedule—
“the border area” has the meaning given by paragraph 4,
“captain” means master of a ship or commander of an aircraft,
“port” includes an airport and a hoverport,
“ship” includes a hovercraft, and
“vehicle” includes a train.
(3)A place shall be treated as a port for the purposes of this Schedule in relation to a person if an examining officer believes that the person—
(a)has gone there for the purpose of embarking on a ship or aircraft, or
(b)has arrived there on disembarking from a ship or aircraft.Power to stop, question and detain
2(1)An examining officer may question a person to whom this paragraph applies for the purpose of determining whether he appears to be a person falling within section 40(1)(b).
(2)This paragraph applies to a person if—
(a)he is at a port or in the border area, and
(b)the examining officer believes that the person’s presence at the port or in the area is connected with his entering or leaving Great Britain or Northern Ireland [or his travelling by air within Great Britain or within Northern Ireland].
(3)This paragraph also applies to a person on a ship or aircraft which has arrived at any place in Great Britain or Northern Ireland (whether from within or outside Great Britain or Northern Ireland).
(4)An examining officer may exercise his powers under this paragraph whether or not he has grounds for suspecting that a person falls within section 40(1)(b).
My favorite part is the last line: “An examining officer may exercise his powers under this paragraph whether or not he has grounds for suspecting that a person falls within section 40(1)(b).”
The actions taken against Miranda were intended to send a message to Greenwald and other journalists that their families will not be protected from repercussions in such controversies. Indeed, the crude tactics conveyed a menacing message that the government is not concerned with public outcry or any notion of checks on its actions. You will note that no one in Congress has demanded to know if American officials were involved in this abusive action. Scotland Yard refused to answer any questions beyond confirmed that Miranda was held in custody. The message to citizens seems clear: Challenge the government at your own peril . . . and that of your loved ones.
Source: Guardian
Glenn Greenwald To Publish UK Secrets After Britain Detains Partner
Reuters
Posted: 08/19/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/19/glenn-greenwald-uk-secrets-britain-detains-partner_n_3779667.html
Excerpt:
Brazil’s government complained about Miranda’s detention in a statement on Sunday that said the use of the British anti-terrorism law was unjustified.
Many Brazilians are still upset with Britain’s anti-terrorism policies because of the death of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who was mistaken for a suspect in a bombing attempt in 2005. Menezes was shot seven times in the head by police on board an underground train at a London station.
You can bet if the UK/US consortium found any “useful” information on what David had, they would have kept him in custody. David, Laura and Glenn are not in denial about what USGinc. will do, here and everywhere else.
Anon Posted, I saw that also and think it describes USGinc. only too well.
Poitras and Greenwald are as savvy about government surveillance/police state tactics as anyone in the world. Could they really have been dumb enough to send information to one another via Miranda??
The NSA: ‘The Abyss from Which There Is No Return’
By John W. Whitehead
August 19, 2013
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_nsa_the_abyss_from_which_there_is_no_return
Excerpt:
“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”—Senator Frank Church (1975)
We now find ourselves operating in a strange paradigm where the government not only views the citizenry as suspects but treats them as suspects, as well. Thus, the news that the National Security Agency (NSA) is routinely operating outside of the law and overstepping its legal authority by carrying out surveillance on American citizens is not really much of a surprise. This is what happens when you give the government broad powers and allow government agencies to routinely sidestep the Constitution.
Indeed, as I document in my book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, these newly revealed privacy violations by the NSA are just the tip of the iceberg. Consider that the government’s Utah Data Center (UDC), the central hub of the NSA’s vast spying infrastructure, will be a clearinghouse and a depository for every imaginable kind of information—whether innocent or not, private or public—including communications, transactions and the like. In fact, anything and everything you’ve ever said or done, from the trivial to the damning—phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc.—will be tracked, collected, catalogued and analyzed by the UDC’s supercomputers and teams of government agents.
By sifting through the detritus of your once-private life, the government will come to its own conclusions about who you are, where you fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise. Indeed, we are all becoming data collected in government files. Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for “innocent” reasons, surveillance of all citizens, even the innocent sort, gradually poisons the soul of a nation. Surveillance limits personal options—denies freedom of choice—and increases the powers of those who are in a position to enjoy the fruits of this activity.
If this is the new “normal” in the United States, it is not friendly to freedom. Frankly, we are long past the point where we should be merely alarmed. These are no longer experiments on our freedoms. These are acts of aggression.
Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the National Security Agency in the 1970s, understood only too well the dangers inherent in allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers “at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”
Noting that the NSA could enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny” upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
Unfortunately, we have long since crossed over into that abyss, first under George W. Bush, who, among other things, authorized the NSA to listen in on the domestic phone calls of American citizens in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and now under President Obama, whose administration has done more to undermine the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of privacy and bodily integrity than any prior administration. Incredibly, many of those who were the most vocal in criticizing Bush for attempting to sidestep the Constitution have gone curiously silent in the face of Obama’s repeated violations.
Whether he intended it or not, it well may be that Obama, moving into the home stretch and looking to establish a lasting “legacy” to characterize his time in office, is remembered as the president who put the final chains in place to imprison us in an electronic concentration camp from which there is no escape. Yet none of this could have been possible without the NSA, which is able to operate outside the constitutional system of checks and balances because Congress has never passed a law defining its responsibilities and obligations.
The constitutional accountability clause found in Article 1, section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution demands that government agencies function within the bounds of the Constitution. It does so by empowering the people’s representatives in Congress to know what governmental agencies are actually doing by way of an accounting of their spending and also requiring full disclosure of their activities. However, because agencies such as the NSA operate with “black ops” (or secret) budgets, they are not accountable to Congress.
http://www.juancole.com/2013/08/greenwald-terrorist-dictatorship.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+juancole%2Fymbn+%28Informed+Comment%29
Greenwald Partner falsely detained as Terrorist: How to Create a Dictatorship
Posted on 08/19/2013 by Juan Cole
How to turn a democracy into a STASI authoritarian state in 10 easy steps:
1. Misuse the concept of a Top Secret government document (say, the date of D-Day) and extend classification to trillions of mundane documents a year.
2. Classify all government crimes and violations of the Constitution as secret
3. Create a class of 4.5 million privileged individuals, many of them corporate employees, with access to classified documents but allege it is illegal for public to see leaked classified documents
4. Spy on the public in violation of the Constitution
5. Classify environmental activists as terrorists while allowing Big Coal and Big Oil to pollute and destroy the planet
6. Share info gained from NSA spying on public with DEA, FBI, local law enforcement to protect pharmaceuticals & liquor industry from competition from pot, or to protect polluters from activists
7. Falsify to judges and defense attorneys how allegedly incriminating info was discovered
8. Lie and deny to Congress you are spying on the public.
9. Criminalize the revelation of government crimes and spying as Espionage
10. Further criminalize whistleblowing as “Terrorism”, have compradors arrest innocent people, detain them, and confiscate personal effects with no cause or warrant (i.e. David Miranda, partner of Glenn Greenwald)
Presto, what looks like a democracy is really an authoritarian state ruling on its own behalf and that of 2000 corporations, databasing the activities of 312 million innocent citizens and actively helping destroy the planet while forestalling climate activism
When people are afraid they do crazy things. Governments are run by people.
The Snowden Effect, Continued
By Charles p. Pierce.
8/19/13
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/snowden-effect-goes-crazy-over-weekend-081913
Excerpt:
And then, over the weekend, everybody decided to go completely crazy.
It began with Julian Assange’s remarkable assertion that the only hope for American democracy lies with Crazy Uncle Liberty (!) and his son, Senator Aqua Buddha, proving either, a) that they serve remarkable mushrooms with dinner in the Ecuadorian embassy, or b) that Assange knows as much about this country as I know about Icelandic folklore. This was followed by a tweet from Time’s Michael Grunwald that managed, in 140 characters, not only to disgrace almost 400 years of American journalism, but also to give Assange yet another reason to wax righteously paranoid. Neither of these is exactly a public service. And, finally, in a truly terrifying turn, security officials in the UK detained the partner of Glenn Greenwald for the offense, apparently, of being the partner of Glenn Greenwald. Worse, he was detained under an “anti-terrorism” statute. They just love their “anti-terrorism” statutes in the UK.
“London’s Metropolitan Police Service, which had jurisdiction over the case, said in a statement that Mr. Miranda had been lawfully detained under the Terrorism Act and later released, without going into detail. “Holding and properly using intelligence gained from such stops is a key part of fighting crime, pursuing offenders and protecting the public,” the statement said.”
Greenwald sees the fine hand of the administration behind this move. I’m less sure of that. The British are fully capable of gross overreaction in this regard without any prompting from the former colonies although, at this point, and I hate to say this, but who the fk knows of what this administration is capable. What I do know is that, no matter who is behind it, this is butterfly-on-a-wheel sidewalk justice and an embarrassment to any nation pretending to be an evolved democracy.
Bloiuse, Elaine, I am not sure that Miranda was a decoy, and it looks quite possible they could have obtained quite a bit of information from his computer. Oh well, some security agency knows if he really was a decoy. 😉
Repeating:
“The message to citizens seems clear: Challenge the government at your own peril . . . and that of your loved ones.” -Jonathan Turley
Gene,
I was amused by the 70,000 figure as well. That’s a hell of a lot of suspicion. Sort of like the NSA saying well we collect billions of e-mails but only a fraction of those are mistakenly corrected.
However, on the tactic in question, it makes perfect sense from Greenwald’s standpoint to use a decoy.
“LiveRolling coverage”
Glenn Greenwald’s partner detained at Heathrow – reaction
LiveRolling coverage of the reaction to the detention of David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s partner, at Heathrow under terrorist legislation
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/aug/19/glenn-greenwald-partner-detained-live-reaction
It is amazing to see how powerful the US govt. is in the world. Just as we bullied small nations into war against Iraq as “a coalition of the willing”, we apparently have top of the line minions across the globe. France, Germany and Austria were happy to ground Morales plane, Brittan is well beyond being a poodle at this point. Honestly, you’d think they’d be embarrassed to openly parade their own unjust laws in their people’s face because the US told them to.
They do have some govt. officials making noises and it may bring about push back on this “law”. As much as both govt.’s coming clean scares me (because they are a very scary group) it makes me hopeful too. A lot of this was flying beyond people’s radar. Something about this is striking a cord with many people. Glenn has become more determined. I am hoping even some of our stenographers realize what is at stake here and step forward with their own information and restart a free press.
Geez, Blouise!
I think I may have to switch to the coffee IV this morning.
Still, the “unprovoked observation” about tactics from the government’s standpoint is I think valid.
Mike S.,
Pluperfect example up thread of what we discussed
“Mike S.,
Pluperfect example up thread of what we discussed”
Yes it is isn’t it.
As far as the possibility of decoy goes, one never knows. Greenwald et. al. are at least as smart as those pursuing them and probably a lot more creative.
My greatest fear re: Greenwald and others is the good possibility of his being murdered in an “accident”. Hastings death was suspicious and given the history of intelligence Black Ops in this country, who really knows what lengths they’ll go to. Saw a story the other day about the CIA finally admitting they got rid of Mossadegh in Iran. That in itself led to disastrous consequences.
There are two novels you’ve probably read, but if not I suggest them. One is “American Tabloid” by James Ellroy and the other is “Harlot’s Ghost” by Norman Mailer. It takes a good novelist to expose the innate truth about many things in life by delving into the psyches of the actors. Mailer and Ellroy nail what goes on behind the scenes in the intelligence community and the upper levels of government. There is truth to be found in both novels, whether or not they have the specific facts right.
We sometimes muse here about the fact that the words of many guest bloggers and commentators might get us in trouble. I’m not particularly brave but I think we are relatively safe at least until the final “clampdown”. It is those like Greenwald who have the most to fear and therefore whose courage is to be admired. They are the people who we need to support.
Sorry, Dog. That problem is actually worse than you state.
It is within 100 miles of the border.
See “Your Rights Under Attack: What A Difference 100 Miles Makes“.
We will see if he meets the fate of Michael Hastings….
But then again…. Didn’t they just convict whitey bulger for these types of things…..
Gene,
We’re not talking about the government’s tactics
Jill,
Thanks…..
Gene,
It would appear that the powers that be in the US and the UK don’t understand what kind of journalist that they are dealing with if they thought they could/would silence/intimidate Greenwald. The corporate media have already been intimidated/bought.