Guardian | 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 over
two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official
claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. 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 within government and Whitehall
favoured a far more draconian approach.
The mood toughened just
over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of
government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff
back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures.
The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I
explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we
complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified.
"You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."
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. But my experience over WikiLeaks – the thumb
drive and the first amendment – had already prepared me for this moment.
I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international
collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations
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. And 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 – 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. "We can call off the black
helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.
Whitehall
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 won't do it in London. The seizure of Miranda's laptop, phones,
hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald's
work.
The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of
surveillance 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 – indeed, most human life in 2013 – leaves too much of a
digital fingerprint. Those colleagues who denigrate Snowden or say
reporters should trust the state to know best (many of them in the UK,
oddly, on the right) 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 Heathrow transit lounges.
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