The latest NSA news — over the weekend — is the detention for nine hours at Heathrow Airport of Glenn Greenwald’s boyfriend, David Miranda. Miranda is one of the journalists working with the under-appreciated Laura Poitras in releasing the Edward Snowden whistle-blown NSA material. Greenwald says Miranda’s laptop and cellphone were confiscated by the British authorities, and never returned.
Base details — Miranda (the detainee) was flying from Berlin after meeting with Poitras on his way to Rio de Janiero. As near as I can tell, he was simply changing planes and not exiting the airport (Glenn says Miranda did not attempt to go through Customs). Miranda was perhaps carrying documents from Poitras to Greenwald. The detention was carried out under an anti-terrorism law. Nevertheless, the interrogation centered on Snowden and Greenwald.
In addition the obvious offensiveness of this, how ham handed and dumb of the UK/US governments?
Just like Obama's press conference on this showed, these actions surrounding a crackdown on the journalism involved here are simply impossible to defend. Stunts like this only make matters worse. Glenn Greenwald is, uh, not the type to be intimidated by bullshit scare tactics.
I almost lost my shit on twitter today over this. I don't like GG as a person, but he hasn't done anything wrong. The Obamabots are out in force on this one.
ReplyDelete...yeah, this is some pretty serious bullshit. That and the other shit going on with the guardian being told by the UK to destroy the hard drives with the NSA info on them or get taken to court.
ReplyDeleteThe hard drive thing is fucking unreal. I just read about that today.
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