White House spokesperson Josh Earnest told reporters on Monday that the US government was given a “heads up” by British law enforcement ahead of their nine-hour detention of David Miranda over the weekend, but he would not discuss whether or not electronic materials seized from the Brazilian national and partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald have yet been shared or made available to US authorities.
From the White House briefing room, Earnest said, “This is a decision that was made by the British government without the involvement – and not at the request – of the United States government. It is as simple as that.”
Earnest gave no indication that US authorities cautioned against such a move and would not speak to directly to questions about whether President Obama found Miranda’s detention “at all concerning.”
Watch the exchange:
Meanwhile, “newspaper editors, human rights lawyers and civil liberties campaigners” all came out against the authority under which Miranda was held, putting pressure on officials in the British government to come clean about how and why such an “unlawful” detention was allowed.
As The Guardian reports:
In addition, in his first series of interviews, Miranda himself told reporters that his detention under a British anti-terrorism law—one in which he was refused access to a lawyer, a language interpreter, or a phone call—was filled with threats veiled and not-so veiled.
“They were threatening me all the time and saying I would be put in jail if I didn’t co-operate,” said Miranda from Brazil in a phone interview with The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts. “They treated me like I was a criminal or someone about to attack the UK … It was exhausting and frustrating, but I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
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Miranda was detained under the authority of schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000, but law experts in the UK say that if there was no true suspicion that the man was a terrorist, but only detained because of his relationship with well-known journalists, the stop was clearly unlawful.
“They got me to tell them the passwords for my computer and mobile phone,” Miranda said. “They said I was obliged to answer all their questions and used the words ‘prison’ and ‘station’ all the time.”
He continued, “I was in a different country with different laws, in a room with seven agents coming and going who kept asking me questions. I thought anything could happen. I thought I might be detained for a very long time.”
As The Guardian recounts:
The accusation that Miranda’s detention was intended to intimidate journalists working on stories related to US and UK national security agencies was at least partially affirmed when “one U.S. security official” told Reuters on Monday that “one of the main purposes of the British government’s detention and questioning of Miranda was to send a message to recipients of Snowden’s materials, including the Guardian, that the British government was serious about trying to shut down the leaks.”
Also late Monday, the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, posted a revelatory narrative about his newspaper’s recent interaction with GCHQ officials and other British authorities, writing:
Later, as Rusbridger describes, “one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred” when a pair of GCHQ agents oversaw the “the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement” which contained portions of the Snowden documents.
Though he said that the “seizure of Miranda’s laptop, phones, hard drives and camera” will have no impact on the newspaper’s ability to continue its reporting on the Snowden documents, he said theses recent events all go to prove that the “state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it.”
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