Miranda Detention

As I am due to travel to the US in a few hours so I am possibly doing one of 2 things

1. Completely screwing my holiday by being banged up by "The Rossers"  (Sounds best when uttered by octogenarians)
2. Being a tad arrogant in assuming any body gives a s**t about what I have to say!

So there you you have it. I am going to write this anyway as I suspect 2 is the likeliest scenario.

The title refers to the nine hour detention and interrogation of David Miranda whilst in transit through Heathrow airport. There is more to come on this story. Some politicians are making a noise and it may be that the Met police or whoever organised it may have to do some justifying of this act especially as the Brazilian government are trying to stick the boot in. Bear in mind that  Jean Charles de Menez (shot in the head down a tube station by armed officers under the misapprehension he was an islamist bomber) was also Brazilian, which perhaps explains the Brazilian reaction.

I am not going to suggest That David Miranda is guilty or not. No I'll be honest, under current information I do suspect he is innocent of any wrong doing. I freely admit I may be shooting from the hip and future events, as more information emerges, may prove me a fool. Still that is the way the cookie crumbles.

As far as I can ascertain from the news media the only crime he has committed is that he is the life partner of a journalist from the Guardian newspaper in the UK. This journalist has been largely responsible for breaking stories from the famous US leaker Edward Snowden. (As ever with Wikipedia take it all with a largish pinch of salt but it will give you a flavour of the situation). If that doesn't get me a heads up at MI6 I will know that nobody reads this. 

What concerns me is the act of parliament that allowed him to be stopped. Schedule 7 of the terrorism act 2000 enables an officer to hold, for up to nine hours, anyone they have suspicions about being involved in terrorism. The full act can be found here. As you see it was 2000 so it predates 9/11. It was originally slated as being a way of dealing with Irish terrorists. It's original predecessor - the Prevention of Terrorism 1974, had been brought into force to try to counter the threat of bombing from Irish terrorist groups brought about by the civil unrest in the province and culminating in the infamous "Bloody Sunday". 

OK so I don't know what information the authorities had on David Miranda but on the face of current information it would seem they were just trying to shakedown a family member of a person who has, at best, just embarrassed the authorities. This is not what the act was designed for. Ever since the 1970's some politicians in this country have decried the acts ability to turn any rights as a citizen on their heads. Effectively your rights as a citizen are null and void as long as they act is invoked. 

The point was that, when dealing with people hell bent on terrorism, the rule book needed to be thrown out of the window. Irish terrorists were extremely well organised, and capable. They knew the way the system worked. Consecutive governments in the UK felt the need to be able to act in a way that was effective. It allowed them to cheat the rule of law for a bit so that terrorists could be stopped from carrying out their evil plans. 

I don't believe this was the case with David Miranda. It is possible that he was carrying information pertaining to Edward Snowden but as far as we know his revelations are all about the intelligence community over reaching itself. Not exactly desperate stuff. 

Whistle blowing does not constitute terrorism - look it up in the dictionary! 

Thanks to this intervention by the authorities they may well find a sort of backlash against the act. It may have some of it's powers revoked or at least made harder to invoke. The result may well be that terrorists who actually threaten us are harder to identify. 

And for what? To gather intel  on just how much Edward Snowden has got? Oh yes I am sure we will all sleep soundly in our beds knowing that Big Brother IS watching you.

A cheesy line in one of the spiderman says goes like this "With great power comes great responsibility!" 

The seemingly vindictive hold up of David Miranda may serve to actually make us less safe in the long term.

Unless the police would like to come forward and inform us on what grounds he was detained.

Thought not.

As a final note this whole Snowdon thing has shown up exactly what it is journalists have t0 go through to bring their stories into the public domain and this in a country that believes in the freedom of the press. They cannot e-mail or post or phone. Clandestine smuggling of information on memory sticks!