Remember a couple of weeks ago, when Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda was stopped by British authorities at the airport and held for nine hours? It was, according to Greenwald, a naked attempt at intimidation:
"This is a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process," Greenwald said. "To detain my partner for a full nine hours while denying him a lawyer, and then seize large amounts of his possessions, 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."
Amnesty International was similarly nonplussed:
Widney Brown, Amnesty International's senior director of international law and policy, said: "It is utterly improbable that David Michael Miranda, a Brazilian national transiting through London, was detained at random, given the role his partner has played in revealing the truth about the unlawful nature of NSA surveillance.
"David's detention was unlawful and inexcusable. He was detained under a law that violates any principle of fairness and his detention shows how the law can be abused for petty, vindictive reasons."
The clear implication in the original version of the story was that Greenwald's lover was detained solely as a message to Greenwald, a way to intimidate him into silence. But then the story was quietly updated to note that the Guardian had paid for Miranda's flight. Then it became known that Miranda was visiting Greenwald's partner-in-crime, Laura Poitras. Then it became known that the British government obtained scads of illegally gathered documents from Miranda's files. And, today, we finally have a sense of how many documents he had on him and how sensitive those documents were:
A UK national security adviser said Friday that some of those 58,000 documents were extremely sensitive to national security. ...
- The material contains "personal information that would allow British intelligence staff to be identified," including overseas.
- Because of the size and scope of the material gathered, the British government believes that Edward Snowden "indiscriminately appropriated material in bulk."
- In what could be a particularly troubling development, the UK government has "had" to assume that Snowden's data is in the hands of foreign governments to which he has traveled: Hong Kong and Russia. (Greenwald told Business Insider last week that it was "highly unlikely" that had happened, however.)
So, David Miranda wasn't stopped because he was Glenn Greenwald's partner, as Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian originally implied. He was stopped because he was carrying a gigantic motherlode of intelligence materials he had no right to own and that put agents at risk.
I'm frequently told that Greenwald's supporters are sick and tired of the NSA and other intelligence entities lying to them about intelligence issues. But I'm honestly curious: Do Glenn Greenwald's supporters ever get tired of being lied to by Glenn Greenwald?
(For more on Greenwald's remarkable ability to lie and lie and lie, check out Joshua Foust's post on the topic.)
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