British Courts Rule Against Miranda and for UK Gov't

(UPDATED below.)

What a surprise, eh?

A British lower court has ruled that London police acted lawfully in employing an anti-terror statute to detain and interrogate David Miranda for nearly nine hours at Heathrow Airport last summer, even while recognizing that the detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom.”

[...]

In a decision released Wednesday morning, three judges on London’s High Court of Justice ruled that while Miranda’s detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom” it was justified and legitimate due to “very pressing” issues of national security.

[...]

Miranda said his suit will continue. “I will appeal this ruling, and keep appealing until the end, not because I care about what the British government calls me, but because the values of press freedom that are at stake are too important to do anything but fight until the end,” he said in a statement to The Intercept.

  The Intercept

I hope he’s got deep pockets. “The end” won’t be any different.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Glenn Greenwald responds.

Equating journalism with terrorism has a long and storied tradition. Indeed, as Jonathan Schwarz has documented, the U.S. Government has frequently denounced nations for doing exactly this. Just last April, Under Secretary of State Tara Sonenshine dramatically informed the public that many repressive, terrible nations actually “misuse terrorism laws to prosecute and imprison journalists.” When visiting Ethiopia in 2012, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns publicly disclosed that in meetings with that nation’s officials, the United States “express[ed] our concern that the application of anti-terrorism laws can sometimes undermine freedom of expression and independent media.” The same year, the State Department reported that Burundi was prosecuting a journalist under terrorism laws.

[...]

The monarchy has no constitutional guarantee of a free press. The UK government routinely threatens newspapers with all sorts of sanctions for national security reporting it dislikes. Its Official Secrets Act makes it incredibly easy to prosecute journalists and others for disclosing anything which political officials want to keep secret.

  The Intercept

He then goes on, rather unprofessionally to sneer at the British government’s system of royalty and lordships. Taunting the bear. I’ll refrain from quoting those parts.

It is not difficult to apprehend the reason the UK government is so desperate to criminalize this reporting. The GCHQ itself made the reason clear in a once-secret memo previously reported by the Guardian. The British agency “has repeatedly warned it fears a ‘damaging public debate’ on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes.”

In other words, the national security the UK (and the US) is worried about has nothing to do with terrorism or invasion. It’s worried about its own citizenry revolting against police state tactics.

As Greenwald points out, the UK has no guarantee of press freedom. Journalists there are in a little different position than here, at least in theory. And while our press may have a constitutional guarantee of freedom, in practice, they are finding that to be under assault.