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Re: F6 post# 208508

Sunday, 09/01/2013 3:38:11 AM

Sunday, September 01, 2013 3:38:11 AM

Post# of 481987
UK: David Miranda Had 58,000 Documents When We Detained Him

By DANICA KIRKA
08/30/13 12:38 PM ET EDT

LONDON -- The British government fears material seized from the partner of a Guardian journalist could compromise counter-terror operations, a senior national security adviser outlined Friday, arguing that intelligence agents in the field could be exposed as a result of the data.

It was the first time the government has offered specific reasoning behind why security services and police are so concerned about material seized from David Miranda – the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. Miranda was detained at Heathrow Airport and questioned for nearly nine hours under terrorism legislation earlier this month, but the government had earlier said only that it required access to the files on national security grounds.

Greenwald has written stories based on material leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Miranda, a 28-year-old university student, was traveling home to Brazil after visiting Germany, where he met with Laura Poitras, a U.S. filmmaker who has worked with Greenwald on the NSA stories.

Oliver Robbins offered a sweeping view of the government concerns before Britain's High Court, saying the 58,000 classified U.K. documents are "highly likely" to describe techniques used in counter-terror operations and could reveal the identities of U.K. intelligence officers abroad.

"It would cause real harm to the work of the U.K.'s national security and intelligence agencies if an intelligence officer were to have his or her identity disclosed on anything other than an authorized and limited basis," Robbins said in the statement dated earlier this week ahead of a Friday hearing.

Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger dismissed the statement as containing "unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims," and questioned the danger, arguing that the government had done little to address the issue before Miranda's detention.

"The way the government has behaved over the past three months belies the picture of urgency and crisis they have painted," Rusbridger said. "The government claims that they have at all times acted with the utmost urgency because of what they believed to be a grave threat to national security. However, their behavior since early June – when the Guardian's first Snowden articles were published – belies these claims."

The statement came as the Guardian and the government agreed to allow the authorities to keep sifting through documents – as long as it was on national security grounds. But Friday's decision expanded that remit, allowing the material to also be examined for "specified criminal grounds." The government revealed the criminal investigation into Snowden's leak of classified material to the Guardian during a court hearing last week.

The agreement came after the Guardian unsuccessfully sued last week to stop police from combing through digital material seized from Miranda.

Miranda's attorneys described the decision as a pragmatic one – since the government was looking through the documents already – and said that Miranda had decided he would make his full argument in October.

"Given the vague doomsday prophecies which the police and Home Office have put before the court, our client decided that the full hearing in October was the better forum in which to argue these fundamental issues of press freedom," Miranda's lawyer Gwendolen Morgan said in a statement. "He hopes that – in open court – the defendants' assertions will be fully tested."

Robbins' statement cited a New York Times article suggesting that Snowden downloaded his material en masse – a process called "scraping." The British government believes that Snowden "indiscriminately appropriated material in bulk and that this information, or at least some of it, is the same material that the claimant was couriering for Mr. Greenwald."

However, Robbins said the government was still seeking to decrypt some of the material seized. They were able to look at some of it because Miranda was carrying "on his person" a handwritten piece of paper containing the password for one of the encrypted files.

© 2013 Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/30/guardian-david-miranda-documents-government-deal_n_3842506.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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UK Asked New York Times To Destroy Edward Snowden Documents

By Mark Hosenball
Posted: 08/30/2013 1:51 pm EDT | Updated: 08/30/2013 7:12 pm EDT

WASHINGTON, Aug 30 (Reuters) - The British government has asked the New York Times to destroy copies of documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden related to the operations of the U.S. spy agency and its British partner, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), people familiar with the matter said.

The British request, made to Times executive editor Jill Abramson by a senior official at the British Embassy in Washington D.C., was greeted by Abramson with silence, according to the sources. British officials indicated they intended to follow up on their request later with the Times, but never did, one of the sources said.

On Friday, in a public statement, Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, said his newspaper, which had faced threats of possible legal action from British authorities, on July 20 had destroyed copies of leaked documents which it had received from Snowden.

Rusbridger said that two days later, on July 22, the Guardian informed British authorities that materials related to GCHQ had made their way to the New York Times and the independent investigative journalism group ProPublica.

Rusbridger said in his statement that it then took British authorities "more than three weeks before anyone from the British government contacted the New York Times.

"We understand the British Embassy in Washington met with the New York Times in mid-August - over three weeks after the Guardian's material was destroyed in London. To date, no-one has contacted ProPublica, and there has been two weeks of further silence towards the New York Times from the government," Rusbridger said.

Rusbridger added that, "This five week period in which nothing has happened tells a different story from the alarmist claims made" by the British government in a witness statement it submitted on Friday to a London court hearing regarding an investigation by British authorities into whether the handling of Snowden's leaks violated British anti-terrorism and official secrets laws.

A spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington told Reuters: "We are not going to get into the specifics about our efforts but it should come as no surprise if we approach a person who is in possession of some or all of this material."

The spokesman added: "We have presented a witness statement to the court in Britain which explains why we are trying to secure copies of over 58,000 stolen intelligence documents - to protect public safety and our national security."

A spokeswoman for the New York Times said the paper had no comment.

The British investigation was opened after authorities at London's Heathrow Airport earlier this month used an anti-terrorism law to detain David Miranda, the domestic partner of Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian writer who has met with Snowden and has played a lead role in writing about material the former NSA contractor leaked.

Miranda was held and questioned for nine hours before being allowed to resume his trip from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, where he and Greenwald live. Greenwald has said that Miranda had carried Snowden related material from him in Brazil to Laura Poitras in Berlin, an American film-maker who has also met with Snowden, and that Miranda was carrying Snowden-related materials which Poitras gave to him back to Greenwald.

In her witness statement submitted to the British court on Friday, Detective Superintendent Caroline Goode, who said she was in charge of Scotland Yard's Snowden-related investigation, said that among materials officials had seized from Miranda while detaining him was an "external hard drive" containing data encrypted by a system called "True Crypt," which Goode said "renders the material extremely difficult to access."

Goode said the hard drive contained around 60 gigabytes of data, "of which only 20 have been accessed to date." She said that she had been advised that the hard drive contains "approximately 58,000 UK documents which are highly classified in nature, to the highest level."

Goode said the process to decode the material was complex and that "so far only 75 documents have been reconstructed since the property was initially received."

Goode also said that its was "likely" that Scotland Yard "is investigating a conspiracy with a global dimension. It is necessary to ascertain if this stolen, classified material has been disseminated to others in order to prevent further disclosure which would prove valuable to terrorists, thereby preventing further offences and protecting public safety."

She also said that "Disclosure of any information contained within those documents would be gravely injurious to UK interests, would directly put lives at risk and would pose a risk to public safety and diminish the ability to counter terrorism."

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/30/uk-new-york-times-destroy-snowden_n_3844706.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07

"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790


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