Britons Question Whether Detention of Reporter’s Partner Was Terror-Related

[morningfog]

LONDON — Demands grew on Monday for the British government to explain why it had used antiterrorism powers to detain the partner of a journalist who has written about surveillance programs based on leaks by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

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Keith Vaz, an opposition Labour Party legislator who is chairman of Parliament’s Home Affairs select committee, said he had written to the head of London’s Metropolitan Police Service, which has jurisdiction in the matter, to ask for clarification of what he called an extraordinary case.

“What needs to happen pretty rapidly is, we need to establish the full facts,” he told the BBC. “Now you have a complaint from Mr. Greenwald and the Brazilian government — they indeed have said they are concerned at the use of terrorism legislation for something that does not appear to relate to terrorism. So it needs to be clarified, and clarified quickly.”

The editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, disclosed on Monday that the British government had sent officials from Government Communications Headquarters, which is known as GCHQ and is the British version of the National Security Agency, to the newspaper’s offices in London to destroy computers containing documents leaked by Mr. Snowden. Mr. Rusbridger said that he had protested that the same information was available elsewhere, but that the officials had insisted on proceeding.

“And so one of the more bizarre moments in The Guardian’s long history occurred — with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in The Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents,” he wrote, adding, “We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won’t do it in London.”

The police said in a statement that Mr. Miranda, 28, had been lawfully detained under Schedule 7 of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, which allows them to stop and question people traveling through ports and airports to determine whether they are involved in planning terrorist acts.

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Mr. Vaz and his party said they wanted to know how the government could justify using Schedule 7 in this case, arguing that any suggestion that antiterrorism powers had been misused could undermine public support for those powers.

A Home Office spokesman said Monday that the detention was an operational police matter and that neither he nor the police would provide any details. “Schedule 7 forms an essential part of the U.K.'s security arrangements,” the spokesman said. “It is for the police to decide when it is necessary and proportionate to use these powers.”

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A White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, told reporters Monday that the British government had given the United States notice that it intended to detain Mr. Miranda when his plane landed, but that there had been no American request to do so.

“This is the British government making a decision based on British law on British soil about a British law enforcement action,” he said, adding, “This is something that they did not do at our direction, is not something that we were involved with. This is a decision that they made on their own.”

He and other administration officials declined to say on Monday whether the British had given the United States government any of the electronic materials seized from Mr. Miranda.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/world/europe/britons-question-whether-detention-of-reporters-partner-was-terror-related.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0