14 DAY TRIAL // UK authorities have detained Glenn Greenwald’s partner for nine hours in London's Heathrow airport under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. Greenwald is the Guardian journalist who has been making all the NSA leaks public for the past few months.
Nine hours is the maximum time allowed for such detentions before authorities have to either arrest the person, get a judge to approve an extension or let them go.
Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, was returning from Germany where he had met with Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who played a crucial role in the Edward Snowden leaks and has been working with Greenwald on the NSA documents.
Miranda was passing through the Heathrow airport on his way home to Brazil, where he lives with Greenwald.
He was detained at the airport and questioned about the NSA reporting that Greenwald and Poitras were doing, not about any perceived "terrorist" threat.
“There is simply no basis for believing that David Michael Miranda presents any threat whatsoever to the UK government. The only possible intent behind this detention was to harass him and his husband, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, for his role in analyzing the data released by Edward Snowden,” Widney Brown, senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty International, said in a statement.
The controversial law that made it possible for him to be detained is only in effect at border crossings and allows police to detain and question individuals as they see fit, if they suspect a terrorist threat.
He was released after the maximum detention period of nine hours, but many of his belongings, particularly electronics like his laptop, his cellphone, various video game consoles, DVDs, USB sticks, were confiscated.
During that time, both Guardian lawyers and Brazil officials, including the ambassador in London, were unable to either contact Miranda or get any details from the authorities.
The fact that the NSA and the GCHQ, the UK equivalent, would stoop to this to intimidate those who would reveal their abuses isn't particularly surprising. If they had no problem grounding the airplane of the president of Bolivia when they suspected Snowden was on board, they obviously wouldn't bat an eye over detaining a journalist's partner in an airport.
"This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism," Greenwald wrote on his telling of the story.
"Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples," he added.
Greenwald says he is not deterred in any way by these actions and, if anything, he's more determined than ever to shed light on the unchecked abuses of the US and UK governments.