David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian journalist who wrote articles using information leaked by Edward Snowden, was detained by British authorities for almost nine hours while making a connection at London's Heathrow airport, according to the Guardian.
Miranda, who was returning to his home in Rio de Janeiro from Berlin, was held for close to nine hours under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The law allows officers to question and hold travelers for up to nine hours exclusively at airports, border crossings and ports. The majority of stops made under the authority of schedule 7 last less than an hour with one in 2,000 people being held over six hours, according to the Guardian.
"Schedule 7 has flown under the radar until now but you can't ignore the fact it is viewed as a draconian measure," Helen Fenwick, joint director of the Human Rights Centre at Durham University, told the Christian Science Monitor. "It's not been viewed as particularly controversial post-9/11 as the police have concentrated on certain suspects and the focus of attention has been on people like Abu Qatada. But now the Labour Party are asking questions as a result of this [detention at Heathrow], effectively querying their own legislation because they were in power when it came in."
When Miranda finally made it home to Brazil he explained to reporters the ordeal that he was put through.
"They asked questions about my whole life, about everything," Miranda said. "They took my computer, video game, cell phone, memory thumb drives - everything."
Prior to making the stop British authorities made the White House aware of the actions they were prepared to take, according to the Washington Post.
"This was a decision that was made by the British government without the involvement and not at the request of the United States government," Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, told reporters. "It's as simple as that.
"I don't have a way to characterize for you any of the conversations between the British government and the U.S. government on this matter, other than to say that this is a decision that they made on their own and not at the request of the United States," Earnest continued. "In terms of, you know, the kinds of classified, confidential conversations that are ongoing between the U.S. and our allies in Britain, I'm not able to characterize that for you."
Miranda's partner, Glen Greenwald, wrote in the Guardian that if the goal of the stop was to intimidate him into no longer reporting on the documents that were leaked by Edward Snowden that it was a failure.
"If the U.K. and U.S. governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded," Greenwald said. "If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further."
