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The Deep State Goes to War With President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer

Glenn _Greenwald



Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The Deep State Goes to War With President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer



Glenn GreenwaldJanuary 11 2017, 9:35 a.m.

Leia em português ⟶


In January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address after serving two terms as U.S. president; the five-star general chose to warn Americans of this specific threat to democracy: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” That warning was issued prior to the decadelong escalation of the Vietnam War, three more decades of Cold War mania, and the post-9/11 era, all of which radically expanded that unelected faction’s power even further.

This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as “Fake News.”

Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss, as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing — eager — to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry, and damaging those behaviors might be.

The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There is a wide array of legitimate and effective tactics for combating those threats: from bipartisan congressional coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times of political crisis or authoritarian overreach.

Snowden: I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldn’t Find Them

BY ANDY GREENBERG
08.13.14 |
7:00 AM |




Platon

If the NSA still doesn’t know the full extent of the greatest leak of secrets in its history, it’s not because of Edward Snowden’s attempts to cover his tracks. On the contrary, the NSA’s most prolific whistleblower now claims he purposefully left a trail of digital bread crumbs designed to lead the agency directly to the files he’d copied.

In a WIRED interview published today, the 31-year-old megaleaker has revealed that he planted hints on NSA networks that were intended to show which of its documents he’d smuggled out among the much larger set he accessed or could have accessed. Those hints, he says, were intended to make clear his role as a whistleblower rather than a foreign spy, and to allow the agency time to minimize the national security risks created by the documents’ public release.

The fact that NSA officials have told the press that his haul may have been as large as 1.7 million documents, says Snowden, is a sign that the agency has either purposely inflated the size of his leak or lacks the forensic skills to see the clues he left for its auditors. “I figured they would have a hard time,” Snowden tells WIRED, describing the agency’s attempts to reverse-engineer his leak. “I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”

In a speech late last year, NSA director Keith Alexander said that Snowden had given reporters “between 50,000 and 200,000 documents.” But in later statements to the press, NSA officials have said only that Snowden “accessed” 1.7 million documents, without specifying how much of that access was part of his authorized NSA duties. And Alexander also admitted in an interview after his resignation that the NSA still doesn’t know the full extent of Snowden’s leak. Indeed, an agency official said in a 60 Minutes interview that its post-leak investigation removed from the NSA’s classified network every computer Snowden could have ever accessed, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, for fear that he might have planted spyware on the machines for future data collection.

That image of Snowden as a stealthy spy contrasts sharply with Snowden’s own depiction of his leaking actions. As journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote in his book No Place To Hide, Snowden claims he could have left no trace on the NSA’s network due to its lack of audit controls. But he said he instead left behind some “footprints” to show NSA investigators that he had acted alone and to prevent suspicion of his coworkers.

Snowden’s new claims go further: That he intended those footprints to outline exactly what he’d taken. In addition to shedding light on his motives, Snowden says he meant the clues to allow the NSA to avoid collateral damage from his leaks, changing codenames and plans to anticipate the release of some of its most sensitive secrets.

The repetition of the 1.7 million number by political figures and the press is at least partly intended to mischaracterize Snowden’s intentions, argues his lawyer Jesselyn Radack, who is also national security director for the whistleblower-focused Government Accountability Project. “I think they probably didn’t spot the bread crumbs,” she says of the NSA’s investigators. “Even if they did get them, I think this [1.7 million] number is manufactured out of whole cloth to give the impression of a wholesale data dump. In fact, Ed very carefully selected exactly what he wanted to turn over and why.”

When WIRED asked an NSA spokesperson to comment on Snowden’s new claims or its internal estimate of the size of his leak, spokesperson Vanee Vines responded with this statement: “If Mr. Snowden wants to discuss his activities, that conversation should be held with the U.S. Department of Justice. He needs to return to the United States to face the charges against him.”

In a followup inquiry through his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner, Snowden wouldn’t offer any more details on how exactly he left his network bread crumbs for the NSA or the real total number of documents he took. In forensic analyses of a typical computer network, a leaker’s behavior could be found in everything from logs kept by network monitoring tools to changes in operating system files like Windows’ system registry, which can be analyzed to show what documents a user has opened.

Despite his early intention to make the NSA aware of the scope of his data theft, Snowden may have good reason to now keep the extent of his leaks secret. That knowledge could serve as an important bargaining chip if Snowden seeks to return to the U.S. and negotiate a plea deal, an option he’s hinted at exploring.

In the meantime, Snowden tells WIRED—perhaps with a certain amount of schadenfreude—that the government’s overestimation of the size of his leak has left it to imagine the worst. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy shit.’ And they think it’s still out there.”

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United States of Secrets: Part One

PBS



Published on May 14, 2014

From PBS and Frontline: Last year Edward Snowden downloaded tens of thousands of top-secret documents from a highly secure government computer network. The revelations that followed touched off a fierce debate over the massive surveillance operations conducted by the National Security Agency. Now FRONTLINE investigates the secret history of the unprecedented surveillance program that began in the wake of September 11th and continues today. Through exclusive interviews with intelligence insiders, cabinet officials, and government whistle-blowers, Part One reveals how the U.S. government came to monitor the communications of millions of Americans and to collect billions of records on ordinary people around the world..

Watch it for free on WNET 13
or
Watch it gratis on PBS site

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In the name of making us "safe," the NSA has shredded privacy rights and now treats all citizens as suspects

October 2013, Volume 15, Number 10
Edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer


View this issue as a PDF

You're not paranoid--they really are spying on you


Rube Goldberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist of the last century, was famous for drawings of what he called "inventions" --complicated contraptions and convoluted schemes for achieving the simplest of goals. His "Simple Lawn Sprinkler," for example, involves (A) a man on a porch rocking back in his chair on (B) a squeeze bulb that sprays water causing (C) a shirt on a clothesline to shrink, thus pulling (D) a string that (E) tips a shelf, dumping (F) a heavy homemade biscuit down into (G) a butterfly net, causing its (H) rod to lift (I) a hood and expose (J) a mouse, which is chased by (K) a cat strapped to (L) a revolving platform, which turns rapidly as the cat and mouse go in a circle, causing (M) a laughing hyena sitting on the platform to spin around and around, with the hyena's nose tickled at every turn by (N) a feather ball, prompting him to laugh so hard he cries--and, as the hyena spins, his tears are flung out to water the lawn.

Apparently, Rube was also the designer of the National Security Agency's "Simple Catch-a-Terrorist Program," for only a mind as impish as his could've invented such a preposterous, roundabout spy scheme. Rather than simply targeting terrorists and really homing in on them, NSA is running a labyrinthian, secret, extravagant, unconstitutional, and out-of-control electronic surveillance operation that targets you. Yes, you! And me. And every other American living in our Land of the Free. This agency has redefined citizens as suspects.



Not that NSA officialdom actually thinks that you, Mr. Upright or Ms. Doright, are terrorists or even "persons of interest" --but, then again, you might be. So, the spook bureaucracy has unilaterally chosen to put its convenience over your constitutional rights. Doing the serious police work to sort out the tiny number of people in our country who are connected in any substantive way to real terrorist threats is too much bother for NSA's techno-warriors, so they've taken the shortcut of dumping all 330 million of us into a digitalized, guilty-until-found-innocent box, keeping an unblinking computer eye on us, and hoping the few bad guys stand out.

They have created an elaborate, electronic Rube-Goldbergish spy matrix that (A) appropriates and agglomerates everyone's "metadata" (a geek term defined as data that provides information about other data), channels it into (B) banks of rapidly spinning supercomputers that (C) analyze your and my terrorist inclinations, based on (D) the phone calls we make and get, (E) emails we send and receive, (F) websites we visit and topics we Google, (G) Facebook friends and pages we like, (H) credit card expenditures and bank transactions we make, and--most telling of all (I) whether we have or have ever had a laughing hyena in our yard.
The SuperLux
Question: "Can you understand, though, why some people might not trust what you're saying?" Obama: "No, I can't." ---- Aug. 9 press conference when the President claimed that NSA's spying is not abusive.

NSA is not just one more entity chipping away at our privacy rights. Its intrusion is huge, both in its unprecedented reach and in its autocratic reordering of our way of life. Our government certainly has the right and duty (just as the governments of other nations) to eavesdrop on those who plot terrorist attacks and pose an actual threat to us. But this is not that. As the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald puts it, NSA "is sweeping up billions and billions of emails and telephone calls every single day from people around the world and in the United States who have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism."

By taking advantage of the pervasive fog of fear blanketing our country since 9/11, this secret arm of government has become the SuperLux Vacuum Cleaner of the Total Surveillance Society. Using the infamous PATRIOT Act, some ridiculously permissive rulings by secret courts, cosmic leaps in surveillance technology, and meek political oversight, NSA has rapidly expanded its power over us since 2001. So, now it routinely and massively violates the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, and maybe even the Sixth.

The most telling thing to know about this elephantine spy outfit is that we have known nothing about it! Until June of this year, you and I, the incurious media, and probably 99 percent of Congress had no clue that such a rampaging monster had so stealthily arisen in our midst.

Just as alarming, those who did know (Presidents Bush and Obama and a few top congressional leaders) felt no duty to inform us. In fact, we still wouldn't know about it--except that several whistleblowers came forward, including one uncommonly bold commoner: Edward Snowden. A 30-year-old computer whiz who worked for an NSA contractor as a systems administrator, he was appalled by what he found the agency doing--and in June he began blowing one of the loudest whistles ever. Snowden pulled a treasure trove of information from NSA's computers and began releasing those dark secrets to Greenwald and other journalists. Stunning revelations continue to pour out of Snowden's laptop, literally blowing the cover off a security state run amok.

Of course, the security establishment has cravenly tried to deflect attention from his releases by making him the villain. "Traitor!" barked boneheaded House Speaker John Boehner, and Obama piled on as well. But the actual betrayers of our people and values are the Boehners and Obamas of both parties, who secretly created, funded, and continuously expanded this illegal spy machine. Whatever you think of Snowden's tactics, he has performed a profound public service by revealing, as one scribe called it, "an intelligence underworld" that threatens our core liberties.
The whole elephant

Do the three hop

To see how easy it is for millions of innocent citizens to get caught up in NSA's vast electronic web, consider the "Three HOP Analysis." ... [read more]

Embarrassed and irritated by Snowden's leaks, Obama charged at an Aug. 9 press conference that Snowden was presenting a false picture of NSA by releasing sensational parts of its work piecemeal: "Rather than have a trunk come out here and a leg a come out there," he said, "let's just put the whole elephant out there so people know exactly what they're looking at."

Full disclosure--terrific! "America is not interested in spying on ordinary people," he assured us. The government, he went on, is not "listening in on people's phone calls or inappropriately reading people's emails."

Six days later, a Washington Post headline blared: "NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year." In an internal audit last year of just its DC-area spy centers, the agency itself found 2,776 "incidences" of NSA overstepping its legal authority. As the American Civil Liberties Union noted, surveillance laws themselves "are extraordinarily permissive," so it's doubly troubling that the agency is surging way past what it is already allowed to do. The ACLU adds that these reported incidents are not simply cases of one person's rights being violated--but thousands of Americans being snared, totally without cause, in NSA's indiscriminate, computer-driven dragnet.

The agency's surveillance net stretches so wide that it is inherently abusive, even though its legal authority to spy on Americans is quite limited. US Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the GOP sponsor of the PATRIOT Act (which NSA cites as its super-vac authority), said in July that Congress intended that it should apply only to cases directly tied to national security investigations. No lawmaker, he said, meant that government snoops should be able to conduct a wholesale grab of Americans' phone, email, and other personal records and then store them in huge databases to be searched at will.

Yet look at what NSA has become:
The three billion phone calls made in the US each day are snatched up by the agency, which stores each call's metadata (phone numbers of the parties, date and time, length of call, etc.) for five years.
Each day, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and other telecom giants turn over to NSA the metadata on every call they have processed. Each corporation has its own secret NSA code name, including such monikers as Blarney, Lithium, and Stormbrew.
Every out-of-country call and email from (or to) a US citizen is grabbed by NSA computers, and agents are authorized to listen to or read any of them. Among the abuses of this power are incidents of agents capturing love notes and sex talk between our troops in Iraq and their spouses back home, and then passing around the juiciest communiques for the amusement of other agency staffers.
The agency searches for and seizes nearly everything we do on the internet. Without bothering with the constitutional nicety of obtaining a warrant, its XKeyscore program scoops up some 40 billion internet records every month and adds them to its digital storehouse, including our emails, Google searches, websites visited, Microsoft Word documents sent, etc. NSA's annual budget includes a quarter-billion dollars for "corporate-partner access" --i.e., payments to obtain this mass of material from corporate computers.
Snowden says that in his days as an analyst, he could sit at his computer and tap into any American's internet activity--even the President's. A blowhard congress critter called that a ridiculous lie, but with the outing of the XKeyscore program, Snowden was proven right. Indeed, it's now come out that in 2005 another analyst did tap into ex-President Bill Clinton's personal email account.
Asked at a March senate hearing whether his agency collects data "on millions or [even] hundreds of millions of Americans," NSA director James Clapper said: "No." He later apologized, claiming he was confused by US Sen. Ron Wyden's question. But, when asked by Wyden to correct his erroneous answer in the hearing record, Clapper refused.
The sheer volume of information sucked up by the agency is so large that as of 2008, it maintained 150 data processing sites around the world.
NSA's budget is an official secret, but a Snowden document shows that it gets about $11 billion a year in direct appropriations, with more support funneled through the Pentagon and other agencies. Included in its direct appropriation last year: $48 million for a study entitled "Coping with information overload."

Apparently, though, too much is not enough for this insatiable agency. A Snowden release early last month revealed NSA's most closely guarded secret, a program code-named "Bullrun." By spending billions of dollars in the past decade on supercomputer trickery, lawyers, lobbyists, and expert safecrackers from unnamed high-tech corporations, NSA found its way around the encryption codes (i.e., locks) that protect the data in our bank accounts, medical records, email accounts, smartphones, and other deeply personal places we've been told are safe from prying eyes. These digitally scrambled codes are what secure the public trust in internet privacy. Yet NSA, using our own tax dollars, has imperiously busted the locks... and found its way around the encryption.

Clapper hails the new "cryptanalytic capabilities" of his agency, saying it can now "exploit internet traffic" by entering at will into everyone's online communications and transactions. One leading cryptographer says the breakthrough gives to NSA (and spy agencies of other countries) the ability to conduct "instant, total invasion of privacy with limited effort." He adds that, "This is the golden age of spying."
Four frauds

NSA's unbridled spying is exacerbated by official lying. Here are four big ones presently being tossed at us:

1. It's just metadata. This line is meant to soothe those of us concerned about Big Brother by asserting that the content of calls we make within the US is not listened to or recorded--just phone numbers, date and time, and duration. "Telephony metadata," they call it--no privacy worries about it.

Wrong, says the ACLU, which has sued to stop NSA from sucking every American's call into its bottomless computers. The spies have neither cause nor a warrant to seize the records of innocent people, and the "innocuous" info being stored chills our rights to privacy, speech, and association. Why should NSA know that we've called a pastor, an ex-lover, a political group, a fortune teller, a bar, etc.? Call patterns reveal our habits and associations.That's not just metadata. Those are profiles. Pieces of ourselves. Hands off!

2. Lawmakers keep NSA honest. "Every member of Congress has been briefed on this program," Obama fibbed after the agency's bulk collection of US phone calls was exposed in June. Actually, just a handful (sometimes only two) get substantive briefings, while the rest get NSA talking points. When members of intelligence oversight committees do learn about agency horrors, they are not allowed to discuss them with anyone, even other lawmakers.

Besides, most members are unwilling to challenge the security state for fear of looking soft on terrorists, or of losing campaign donations from NSA's corporate partners. Last December, the Senate defeated a measure requiring NSA to disclose its domestic spying, and the House killed a July effort to stop the mass collection of our people's private data.

3. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court keeps NSA legal. First, this thing is a secret court, so who would know? Its 11 members are lifetime federal judges who are handpicked by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for this special surveillance "oversight" duty, and they are not accountable to any elected officials (short of being impeached), much less to the public. The court's hearings are closed, but its pro-spying decisions are not subject to judicial review, and no one but officials pushing for more spying are allowed to participate, so the privacy view is not even heard.

Thus, of 1,789 requests for electronic snooping submitted to FISC last year, not a single one was rejected. Also, even some of the court's judges have complained that NSA regularly misrepresents what it is doing -- and some have complained in their secret rulings (leaked by Snowden) that NSA is systematically violating the Fourth Amendment. Finally, a common complaint of judges is that, with no investigative power, they have no way to make an independent evaluation of NSA's requests.

4. Reform is coming! Obama has announced not one or two, but three investigative panels to review NSA's spy work and make sure it's on the up-and-up. Panel One is the Privacy and Civil Liberties Review Board, but's it's an empty vessel--until January of this year, it had no chairperson, no staff, and has done no work. PCLRB has no authority to compel testimony or subpoena documents, so it's essentially at the mercy of NSA officials to confess.

Panel Two is the US Senate's intelligence committee, which says it will do a "sweeping review of surveillance." But, its two leaders, Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, are NSA sycophants who've heretofore failed completely to provide any rigorous oversight of its work. And since Snowden's stuff hit the fan in June, both have rushed to assail him and rejected suggestions that the agency might be a tiny bit off the constitutional path.

But Panel Three is the President's main play. He announced the creation of this special "independent group" of "outside experts" in August, tasking it to "tighten a few bolts" so NSA can "maintain the trust of the people." And who better to foster trust than the outside expert chosen by Obama to oversee this group: James Clapper! Yes, the guy who lied to Congress! Yes, this external review group starts out as thoroughly compromised, since it's organized by Clapper's office and will function under his purview.
An un-American America

Like the steady slippage of our democracy into plutocracy, this clandestine slide toward autocracy raises THE BIG QUESTION: What kind of country is America going to be?

The very fine public servant, Russ Feingold, addressed this in October 2001, when he stood tall as the only US Senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act. Warning that its anti-democratic provisions would create a nation "where the government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications," Feingold rightly concluded: "That country wouldn't be America."

So here we are, having devolved from the founders' principled insistence on erecting the strongest palisades for the defense of the people's personal liberties--to now having a secret government inside our borders and inside our lives. Even the code-names of NSA's array of electronic eyes are almost comically Orwellian: PRISM, Tempora, XKeyscore, and--my favorite--Boundless Informant.

Boundless indeed. But all this, for what? To make you and me safe from terrorists, the hierarchy chants in unison. Constantly pointing to 9/11, the spies and their political henchmen solemnly assert that, hypothetically, bulk surveillance of every American might have, possibly could have, maybe would have stopped that horrific plot. But the phone conversations that mattered in that case were those that did NOT happen--the breakdown in communication between the CIA and the FBI, and between FBI headquarters and its local agents.

When the top brass of US SpyWorld did a dog and pony show for the House intelligence committee on June 18, they claimed that "dozens" of terrorist attacks had been prevented since 9/11 by NSA's SuperVac programs. Dozens? "More than 50," clarified NSA's director. But wait, how many of those were plots for terrorist attacks on our soil? "A little over 10," he mumbled. That's it? Years of scooping up ALL metadata on EVERY American to find only 10 plots?

Moreover, he was able to name only four of those 10, and none were serious threats to do major harm to Americans. In fact, one involved a bombing in India, one is a questionable case of $8,500 ostensibly sent to terrorists in Somalia, one was actually uncovered by regular police work, and the fourth was not a plot to attack the US, but to send funds abroad to Al Qaeda. For this we should shred our Bill of Rights?

We can heap plenty of blame for this on Bush-Cheney, but it has been brought to full force by Obama--a constitutional lawyer who pledged in 2008 to reverse the PATRIOT Act's assault on our civil liberties. Yet he's doing the opposite, and incredibly, he's insisting that "the program currently is not being abused." Worse, he's become testy about all the questioning of him and NSA. "We've got congressional oversight and judicial oversight," he said to a reporter on Sept. 13, then expressed exasperation that people don't have faith in the system: "And if people can't trust not only the executive branch, but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."

Well, yes sir, you do have some problems, BIG ones. Obama and the surveillance establishment are proposing a bit more "disclosure" to fix the agency's PR problem. But that's just warmed over B.S. We can't give him--or Congress--a pass on this. It's too big, too destructive of our values and self respect. NSA's domestic spy matrix and the PATRIOT Act itself confront us as a multi-eyed, hydra-headed, democracy-devouring monster. Forget disclosure--the monster must be dismantled.


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Glenn Greenwald's partner detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours

David Miranda, partner of Guardian interviewer of whistleblower Edward Snowden, questioned under Terrorism Act

Glenn Greenwald: a failed attempt at intimidation



Guardian staff
The Guardian, Sunday 18 August 2013 16.08 EDT




Glenn Greenwald (right) and his partner David Miranda, who was held by UK authorities at Heathrow aiport. Photograph: Glenn Greenwald


The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last under an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

Since 5 June, Greenwald has written a series of stories revealing the NSA's electronic surveillance programmes, detailed in thousands of files passed to him by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Guardian has also published a number of stories about blanket electronic surveillance by Britain's GCHQ, also based on documents from Snowden.

While in Berlin, Miranda had visited Laura Poitras, the US film-maker who has also been working on the Snowden files with Greenwald and the Guardian.

"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.

"But the last thing it will do is intimidate or deter us in any way from doing our job as journalists. Quite the contrary: it will only embolden us more to continue to report aggressively."

A spokesperson for the Guardian said: "We were dismayed that the partner of a Guardian journalist who has been writing about the security services was detained for nearly nine hours while passing through Heathrow airport. We are urgently seeking clarification from the British authorities."

A spokesperson for Scotland Yard said: "At 08:05 on Sunday, 18 August a 28-year-old man was detained at Heathrow airport under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was not arrested. He was subsequently released at 17:00."

Scotland Yard refused to be drawn on why Miranda was stopped using powers which enable police officers to stop and question travellers at UK ports and airports.

There was no comment from the Home Office in relation to the detention. However, there was surprise in political circles and elsewhere. Labour MP Tom Watson said that he was shocked at the news and called for it to be made clear if any ministers were involved in authorising the detention.

He said: "It's almost impossible, even without full knowledge of the case, to conclude that Glenn Greenwald's partner was a terrorist suspect.

"I think that we need to know if any ministers knew about this decision, and exactly who authorised it."

"The clause in this act is not meant to be used as a catch-all that can be used in this way."

Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act has been widely criticised for giving police broad powers under the guise of anti-terror legislation to stop and search individuals without prior authorisation or reasonable suspicion – setting it apart from other police powers.

Those stopped have no automatic right to legal advice and it is a criminal offence to refuse to co-operate with questioning under schedule 7, which critics say is a curtailment of the right to silence.

Last month the UK government said it would reduce the maximum period of detention to six hours and promised a review of the operation on schedule 7 amid concerns it unfairly targets minority groups and gives individuals fewer legal protections than they would have if detained at a police station.
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NBC Meet the Press - Sunday 6/23/13

Sun Jun 23, 2013 11:41 AM EDT

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

David Gregory interviews The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald about the developing Edward Snowden story and why Greenwald thinks his source should not be viewed as a criminal for leaking classified NSA information. Assistant Democratic Leader Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Ranking member of the Homeland Security and immigration "Gang of 8" member, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., weigh in on how the NSA scandal affects national security and discuss the future of immigration reform.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A panel of experts discuss the NSA scandal and provide insights and analysis on the politics behind the immigration battle on Capitol Hill.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A panel of experts discuss whether immigration reform can get through the House and the controversy surrounding Paula Deen.


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Glenn Greenwald: I have more secrets to reveal

Issues: National Security

June 9, 2013 | 1:03 pm

On ABC’s ‘This Week,’ journalist Glenn Greenwald explained that Americans could expect him to reveal more secrets about the government surveillance programs.

Greenwald wrote two bombshell stories last week in the Guardian newspaper – one about the National Security Agency obtaining phone records from Verizon customers and one about the agency’s PRISM program.

“[S]hould we be expecting more revelations from you?” asked Stephanopoulos.

“You should,” Greenwald answered shortly.

Greenwald remained quiet about his sources, reminding Stephanopoulos about the importance of whistle-blowers.

“[E]very time there is a whistle-blower, somebody who exposes government wrongdoing, the tactic of the government is to try and demonize them as a traitor. They risk their careers, and their lives, and their liberty. Because what they were seeing being done in secret, inside the United States government is so alarming, and so pernicious that they simply want one thing,” Greenwald explained. “And that is for the American people, at least to learn about what this massive spying apparatus is, and what the capabilities are, so that we can have an open, honest debate about whether that’s the kind of country that we want to live in.”

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