The officers seized Miranda’s cellphone, camera, laptop, encrypted memory sticks, and external hard drive...Miranda is the partner of
Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who, since June, has broken a series of stories about programs conducted by the National Security Agency and other Western intelligence services, all based upon leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. One such program, Prism, enables the NSA to gather data from Internet companies; Greenwald also revealed the existence of a top-secret court order that gave the agency access to telephone record logs, or “metadata,” from Verizon.
Greenwald and others portrayed these legal programs in Orwellian terms, writing cryptically of sinister “mass surveillance,” as if every human being’s phone calls and emails were being overheard and read by analysts.
Miranda had been traveling from Berlin—where he had met with Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker collaborating with Greenwald and Snowden—to Rio de Janeiro, where he lives with Greenwald. Even as the detention was ongoing, Greenwald was furiously depicting it as the workings of an authoritarian state bent on silencing its critics. “This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart,” he fumed in a blog post published the following day. Greenwald then went on to compare the British government’s “simply despotic” behavior unfavorably to the Mob, writing that “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 U.S. national-security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.”
