In a private viewing cinema in London’s Soho last week, I caught myself letting fly with a four-letter expletive at Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times. It was a confusing moment. The man who was pretending to be me — thanking Keller for “not giving a shit” — used to be Malcolm Tucker, a foul-mouthed Scottish spin doctor who will soon be a 1,000-year-old time lord. Keller will correct me, but I do not remember ever swearing at him. I do remember saying something to the effect of “we have the thumb drive, you have the First Amendment.”
The fictional moment occurs at the beginning of the DreamWorks film about WikiLeaks, The Fifth Estate, due for release next month. Scottish actor Peter Capaldi is, I can report, a very plausible Guardian editor.
This real-life exchange with Keller happened just after the Guardian took possession of the first tranche of WikiLeaks documents in 2010. I strongly suspected that our ability to research and publish anything to do with this trove of secret material would be severely constrained in the UK.
The US, for all its problems with media laws and whistleblowers, at least has press freedom enshrined in a written constitution. It is also, I hope, unthinkable that any US government would attempt prior restraint against a news organization planning to publish material that informed an important public debate, however embarrassing.
On Sunday morning, David Miranda, the partner of Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, was detained as he was passing through London’s Heathrow Airport on his way back to Rio de Janeiro, where the couple live.
Greenwald is the reporter who has broken most of the stories about state surveillance based on the leaks from the former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.
Greenwald’s work has undoubtedly been troublesome and embarrassing for Western governments, but as the debate in the US and Europe has shown, there is considerable public interest in what his stories have revealed about the right balance between security, civil liberties, freedom of speech and privacy. He has raised acutely disturbing questions about the oversight of intelligence, the use of closed courts, the cozy relationship between government and vast corporations, and about the extent to which millions of citizens now routinely have their communications intercepted, collected, analyzed and stored.
In this work he is regularly helped by Miranda, who, although he is not a journalist, still plays a valuable role in helping his partner do his journalistic work.
Greenwald has his plate full reading and analyzing the Snowden material, writing, and handling media and social media requests from around the world. He can certainly use this backup. That work is immensely complicated by the certainty that it would be highly unadvisable for Greenwald (or any other journalist) to regard any electronic means of communication as safe.
The Guardian’s work on the Snowden story has involved many individuals taking a huge number of flights to have face-to-face meetings. Not good for the environment, but increasingly the only way to operate. Soon, we will be back to pen and paper.
Miranda was held for nine hours under Schedule 7 of the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000, which gives enormous discretion to stop, search and question people who have no connection with “terror,” as ordinarily understood. Suspects have no right to legal representation and may have their property confiscated for up to seven days. Under this measure — uniquely crafted for ports and airport transit areas — there are none of the checks and balances that apply once someone is in Britain proper. There is no need to arrest or charge anyone and there is no protection for journalists or their material. A transit lounge in Heathrow is a dangerous place to be.
Miranda’s professional status — much hand-wringing about whether he is a proper “journalist” — is largely irrelevant in these circumstances. Increasingly, the question about who deserves protection should be less: “Is this a journalist?” than “Is the publication of this material in the public interest?”
The detention of Miranda has rightly caused international dismay because it feeds into a perception that the US and UK governments — while claiming to welcome the debate around state surveillance started by Snowden — are also intent on stemming the tide of leaks and on pursuing the whistleblower with a vengeance. That perception is right. Here follows a little background on the considerable obstacles being placed in the way of informing the public about what the intelligence agencies, governments and corporations are up to.
A little more than two months ago, I was contacted by a very senior UK government official claiming to represent the views of British Prime Minister David Cameron. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others in government favored a far more draconian approach.
The mood toughened just more than a month ago, when I received a telephone call from the center of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.”
There followed further meetings with shadowy government figures. The demand was the same: Hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I said that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from the government looked mystified.
“You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more,” he said.
During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian’s reporting through a legal route — by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government’s intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. However, my experience over WikiLeaks — the thumb drive and the First Amendment — had already prepared me for this moment.
I told the man from the government about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organizations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. Had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?
The man was unmoved and so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred: Two security experts from the Government Communications Headquarters (the British intelligence agency responsible for providing signals intelligence) oversaw the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal that could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents.
“We can call off the black helicopters,” joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.
The UK government was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just will not do it in London. The seizure of Miranda’s laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly not affect Greenwald’s work.
The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance that it will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that, but I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes — and, increasingly, it looks like “when.”
We are not there yet, but it may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to have confidential sources. Most reporting — and most people — leaves too much of a digital fingerprint. Those colleagues who denigrate Snowden or say reporters should trust the state to know best may one day have a cruel awakening. One day it will be their reporting, their cause, under attack, but at least reporters now know to stay away from airport transit lounges.
Alan Rusbridger is editor of the Guardian.
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