Snowden journo's partner wins partial injunction on seized data David Miranda, the journalist's partner held for nine hours at Heathrow under anti-terror laws, has managed to get a partial High Court injunction to stop the police "inspecting, copying or sharing" the data they seized from him - except for national security purposes. Lawyers for Miranda confirmed to The Reg that they'd won …
@Pascal Monett wrote:
-- It happened in the UK - and they have no Miranda rights.
True, but England and Wales do have an established "Right to Silence" law. Many other Commonwealth Countries and Realms have similar Statutes.
However, this is also tempered (many would argue diluted) by the so-called "Adverse Inferences" clauses, in which Police and Prosecution are allowed to draw limited evidentiary conclusions from the fact that the Defendant enacted his/her Right to Silence. The "Adverse Inferences" regulations are laid forth in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
@Dan Paul
There have been several other articles and discussions relating to Mr Miranda's detention and the episode in the Guardian cellars during the past few days. If you look at those you'll find that the significance of his name has been repeatedly pointed out.
"I find it strange but does anyone find his last name rather ironic?
[...]
Knowing and understanding your rights as I have explained them to you, are you willing to answer my questions without an attorney present?"
...and that was one of the interesting points to come out of this tawdry imbroglio, in which senior Guardian journalists spoke with injured tones about their 'rights' to see classified information stolen from another country.
You see, Miranda would have been held for only one (1) hour but he felt that the duty solicitor was not good enough for him. Oh no; instead Miranda opted to invoke a solicitor who, it transpired, could not be with him for a further eight (8) hours. Uhuh.
The whole thing has the stink of something rotten, starting with Rusbridger's terminological inexactitudes, running through the photographs of kit supposedly destroyed (no sign of storage devices though), later quiet confessions by Rusbridger that Miranda was indeed on a mission for his partner and not an 'innocent civilian' in this matter, and indeed that Miranda's travel expenses were being paid by... ...the Guardian.
At the bottom of this pit of journalistic dissimulation are heaps of data, stolen from a NATO power, and given by the thief to foreign journalists who speak confidently of their 'rights' in the matter. (Hollow laughter.)
Am I really the only techie here who can see this?
From what we've been told, the "data" was encrypted - and given Mr. Snowden's involvement in all this, together with the fact we are dealing with a journalist who specialises in security stories, one or two questions really do demand answers...
1/ The UK Government are claiming, in court, to know the content - to have read it and understood it. It follows from this that they have the clear data. Surely we are not being led to believe they have cracked the encryption in 5 days?
2/ Miranda has apparently given passwords to the computer and to his social media accounts. From what I have read, he hasn't divulged any decryption keys.
3/ If Snowden / Greenwald know what they are doing (and we have to assume they do...), far from revealing decryption keys, Miranda shouldn't even know them. He should, for all intents and purposes, merely be moving a lump of plastic and silicone from country A to county B. There are good reasons, as I'm sure he know appreciates, for Miranda to know nothing at all about the security measures taken...
4/ *If* they don't have the data, and to be honest I rather suspect they don't, then the government are lying - to a court. Given the number of illegal acts Snowden has already exposed, it's sadly no longer difficult to imagine that our security services / government would have a problem with doing this...
Like I say - there's more going on here than meets the eye...
1/ The UK Government are claiming, in court, to know the content - to have read it and understood it. It follows from this that they have the clear data. Surely we are not being led to believe they have cracked the encryption in 5 days?
Under the RIPA act, if the Police ask you to hand over decryption keys and you fail to do so, you can be imprisoned, I think for up to two years.
Miranda almost certainly did hand over the decryption keys to the files, because he would have been prosecuted if he didn't.
First of all, I am not sure (someone more learned than I might like to comment) that RIPA can be invoked in an Airport Transit area. It's important to remember that he wasn't, technically, stood in the United Kingdom.
Again though, we come back the "compentence" point. If they knew what they were doing, MIranda should not have had knowledge of the decryption keys. Surely even RIPA cannot be used to punish him for failing to disclose information to which he has never had access?
Additionally were I in their shoes, I would almost certainly have used a hidden partition, with something pleasingly innocent on the exposed partitiion to keep the boys in blue happy...
I think the only thing we do know here are that there are a lot of things we don't...
...an Airport Transit area. It's important to remember that he wasn't, technically, stood in the United Kingdom
IANAL, but I think the idea of extra-territorial zones is a myth. Some areas, such as embassies, are subject to diplomatic protection, but they are still part of the UK. There's a bit of US territory at Runnymede, and a bedroom in Claridges was declared to be Yugoslav soil during the war. But there's no reason why a transit area should have any special privileges beyond the fact that people can go there without passing Customs or Immigration. It's more like a bonded warehouse than an embassy.
"Miranda almost certainly did hand over the decryption keys to the files, because he would have been prosecuted if he didn't."
That is not only the parsimonious answer that would have been demanded by William of Occam, but it is also the fact as spoken in public.
Any half brain-dead idiot would know ANY Snowden data is political plutonium and having it on your person will cause some serious damage from governments trying to recover it.
I personally would have rolled the data into a VDH or something encrypted with a drive encryption package, packed into a passworded encrypted rar file that has been encrypted with PGP, uploaded to a private sftp server via the TOR network.
My personal media would have then been either physically destroyed or scrubbed with a military grade drive cleaning tool, twice then reinstalled and filled with porn and torrent downloads.
Clearly The Guardian is considered to be up to no good- acting against the common good, aiding the enemy, possessing secrets, conspiring with Terrorists, or whatever...
But it shows that, in the war against terror, journos are as fair a game in a 'free country' as Terrorists. Guardian journos, but if they suspected another organisation, it'd be them too. But make no mistake, if Miranda was not a less known journo, they'd probably have sent him to Guantanamo for a few rounds of water boarding by now. It is not a war on journos though, this is The War on Terror. The war with no enemy, with no end.
The war understood by anyone tasked to protect as a war on everyone, anyone, and one they need a lot more information to succeed against, (even if just for a short time). Once they have all the info, they will be... bwah ahaa ahahaaaaa... I-N-D-E-S-T-R-U-C-T-I-B-L-E!
But in reality the war will have simply moved onto a new, non-public arena where enemies corrupt, hack and innovate their way through everyone's systems (inc the Governments') to achieve the same ends as before.
But relax, your government's are fighting to protect you. In the process, all the news is censored to be in the 'national interest'.
All your data belong to Us*,
All your freedom belong to Them**, and
All your prosperity has mystically vanished into numerous global conflicts***
* the overlords formerly known as organised crime, terrorists, misguided corporations, etc.
** the governments 'protecting you'
*** struggles over influence, resources, money and power presented as anything that will motivates a majority, (that occur with ever-increasing intensity and regularity).
Ah, how strong and vibrant modern democracy is! How free from failure we have made it!
Having learned so much since Hitler and Stalin, we cannot be fooled anymore. We know now that War over land, oil or the next election is good. Lying to go to war is okay (E.g. Bush's WMDs in Iraq) and only the Terrorists, Journos (and so many others) amongst us are bad.
But look on the good side: At least any form of international action over unimportant things like genocide, international conventions, serial despotism... all that nandy-pandyness is now long gone. Thank all the Good Lawyer's# for that.
# Good Lawyers, rather like Good Lords- do they actually exist?
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