Tag Archives: Laura Poitras

| Will the US State Dept Condemn UK’s Attempt to Use ‘Terrorism’ Laws to Suppress Journalism?

Posted on by
1

Will the US State Dept Condemn UK’s Attempt to Use ‘Terrorism’ Laws to Suppress Journalism? ~ Trevor Timm, Freedom of the Press Foundation.

In a shocking court filing this week, the UK government accused journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda of “terrorism” for allegedly transporting leaked (and heavily encrypted) NSA documents from documentarian Laura Poitras in Germany to Greenwald in Brazil, on a journalistic mission paid for by the Guardian newspaper.

In a statement that should send chills down the spine of every reporter, the government made the unbelievable claim that merely publishing information that has nothing to do with violence still “falls within the definition of terrorism.”

“Additionally the disclosure, or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism…”

Think about the sheer breadth of that statement. Not only are several Guardian reporters and editors also guilty of engaging in “terrorism” under the UK government’s logic, but so are New York Times or Pro Publica journalists who have received the same news-worthy documents for publication. If publishing or threatening to publish information for the purpose “promoting a political or ideological cause” is “terrorism,” than the UK government can lock up every major newspaper editorial board that dares write any opinion that strays from the official government line.

No matter one’s opinion on the NSA, the entire public should be disturbed by this attack on journalism. In fact, this is exactly the type of attack on press freedom the US State Department regularly condemns in authoritarian countries, and we call on them to do the same in this case.

For example, in January 2012, in response to Ethiopia jailing award-winning journalist Eskinder Nega, the State Department expressed “concern that the application of anti-terrorism laws can sometimes undermine freedom of expression and independent media.” Again in June State Department released a statement saying, “The Ethiopian government has used the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation to jail journalists and opposition party members for peacefully exercising their freedoms of expression and association.”

The 2012 State Department human rights report on Turkey criticizes the country for imprisoning “scores of journalists…most charged under antiterror laws or for connections to an illegal organization.”

In April 2013, the State Department cited Burundi for imprisoning radio journalist Hassan Ruvakuki and three of his colleagues for “acts of terrorism.”

Just last month, in response to respected Moroccan journalist Ali Anouzla being arrested under an anti-terror law for linking to a Youtube video, the State Department said, “We are concerned with the government of Morocco’s decision to charge Mr. Anouzla. We support freedom of expression and of the press, as we say all the time, universal rights that are an indispensable part of any society.”

As the Committee to Protect Journalists noted in their excellent report on the misuse of terror laws, “The number of journalists jailed worldwide hit 232 in 2012, 132 of whom were held on anti-terror or other national security charges. Both are records in the 22 years CPJ has documented imprisonments.”

Warping “terrorism” laws to suppress journalism is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes and deserves to be condemned by all. The Miranda case is a classic example of, as the State Department has put it, “misus[ing] terrorism laws to prosecute and imprison journalists.”

We call on the State Department to apply the same principle they’ve applied to these authoritarian regimes and condemn the UK for misusing its “terrorism” laws to suppress journalism and free expression.

Editor’s Note: Both Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are founding board members of Freedom of the Press Foundation

________________________________________________________________________

 

Related articles

| Glenn Greenwald and the $250 Million “Angel Investor!”

Posted on by
2

Glenn Greenwald and the $250 Million “Angel Investor” ~ Jonathan Franklin, Truthout.

Glenn Greenwald, the author and blogger behind the publication of the NSA documents obtained by former contractor Edward Snowden, announced Oct. 16, 2013, that he is leaving British newspaper The Guardian to join what he described as a “once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity,” a new media organization designed to promote in-depth reporting.

2013.10.17.Greenwald.MainGlenn Greenwald speaking at the Young Americans for Liberty’s Civil Liberties tour at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. (Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

According to news reports, a minimum of $250 million will be invested in the all-digital, no-print project. The yet-unnamed media project will be bankrolled by Pierre Omidyar, the 46-year-old billionaire founder of eBay. Omidyar, who was considering buying The Washington Post this year, decided that for the same price – $250 million – he could build his own investigative journalism outfit.

In an interview with NYU journalism professor James Rosen, Omidyar said the project “brings together some of my interests in civic engagement and building conversations and of course technology, but in a very creative way.” Omidyar said, “I have always been of the opinion that the right kind of journalism is a critical part of our democracy.” But until the uproar over the Snowden revelations, he hadn’t yet “found a way to engage directly.”

Omidyar, chairman of the board at eBay, has a net worth estimated at $8.5 billion. For the past three years, he has been publisher, CEO and founder of Honolulu-based news site the Civil Beat. While Civil Beat has been run via his nonprofit Omidyar Network, the new venture will be managed separately, with revenue plowed back into journalism. Given Omidyar’s initial quarter-billion-dollar financial commitment and tech credentials as eBay founder, the project is likely to reshape popular concepts of what’s possible in modern journalism.

Initial hires reportedly include Greenwald, his co-reporter and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill of The Nation. The project is likely to focus on privacy, surveillance and what Scahill dubbed America’s “Dirty Wars” executed in secrecy by the Tampa, Florida-based Special Operations Command. But Omidyar has stressed that he wants the new organization to cover entertainment and sports news, as well.

Omidyar’s commitment to the venture will include a bevy of top lawyers and editors. While many details remain under wraps, Rosen said Omidyar will focus on “The Personal Franchise Model,” in which he invests in journalists with a personal brand, e.g. media superstars with huge online following and a solid track record of investigative reporting or specific expertise on a subject.

In a statement posted on a company website, Omidyar wrote: “I don’t yet know how or when it will be rolled out, or what it will look like. What I can tell you is that the endeavor will be independent of my other organizations, and that it will cover general interest news, with a core mission around supporting and empowering independent journalists across many sectors and beats. The team will build a media platform that elevates and supports these journalists and allows them to pursue the truth in their fields. This doesn’t just mean investigative reporting, but all news.”

Given the massive cutbacks and dissolution of news bureaus by US-based media companies, the advent of a huge cash investment plus a tech pioneer looking to reward pre-eminent reporters and editors is a huge shot in the arm for those who believe in a free press. Furthermore, it is an example for every tech company that goes public in a multibillion-dollar IPO (think Facebook and likely Twitter next year). With each new IPO, a crop of tech-savvy young billionaires is born. These power brokers now have the ability to upend the definition of what is possible – not just in journalism but in the field of their choice.

Given the stark revelations from the Snowden documents and the dearth of resources to fund long-term reporting projects, the announcement by Omidyar is likely to resonate for years. As for the final form of his company and the journalism to be pursued, a good bet is to look at Omidyar’s brief forays into journalism at that Honolulu news site, Civil Beat. In a searing defense of Julian Assange in 2010, an editorial from Civil Beat speaks to the inherent rights of a citizenry to be informed of its government’s actions. Referring to US government pressure to strangle WikiLeaks by threatening online payment services, the Civil Beat editorial board wrote “by taking the steps they have to shut down WikiLeaks, governments create a chilling effect on other publishers, making it less likely that information that sheds light on government policy and actions that citizens should know about becomes public.”

It’s not often those powerful statements are backed up by quarter-billion-dollar commitments. This story, I would wager, has just begun.

_________________________________________________________________________

free-speech1

Related articles

| The Real, Terrifying Reason Why British Authorities Detained David Miranda!

Posted on by
4

The Real, Terrifying Reason Why British Authorities Detained David Miranda ~ , The Atlantic.

The scariest explanation of all? That the NSA and GCHQ are just showing they don’t want to be messed with.

Hobbes-Banner.jpg

Illustration from the original edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, by Abraham Bosse (1651)

Last Sunday, David Miranda was detained while changing planes at London Heathrow Airport by British authorities for nine hours under a controversial British law — the maximum time allowable without making an arrest. There has been much made of the fact that he’s the partner of Glenn Greenwald, theGuardian reporter whom Edward Snowden trusted with many of his NSA documents and the most prolific reporter of the surveillance abuses disclosed in those documents. There’s less discussion of what I feel was the real reason for Miranda’s detention. He was ferrying documents between Greenwald and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker and his co-reporter on Snowden and his information. These document were on several USB memory sticks he had with him. He had already carried documents from Greenwald in Rio de Janeiro to Poitras in Berlin, and was on his way back with different documents when he was detained.

The memory sticks were encrypted, of course, and Miranda did not know the key. This didn’t stop the British authorities from repeatedly asking for the key, and from confiscating the memory sticks along with his other electronics.

The incident prompted a major outcry in the U.K. The U.K.’s Terrorist Act has always been controversial, and this clear misuse — it was intended to give authorities the right to detain and question suspected terrorists — is promptingnew calls for its review. Certainly the U.K. police will be more reluctant to misuse the law again in this manner.

I have to admit this story has me puzzled. Why would the British do something like this? What did they hope to gain, and why did they think it worth the cost? And — of course — were the British acting on their own under the Official Secrets Act, or were they acting on behalf of the United States? (My initial assumption was that they were acting on behalf of the U.S., but after the bizarre story of the British GCHQ demanding the destruction of Guardian computers last month, I’m not sure anymore.)

We do know the British were waiting for Miranda. It’s reasonable to assume they knew his itinerary, and had good reason to suspect that he was ferrying documents back and forth between Greenwald and Poitras. These documents could be source documents provided by Snowden, new documents that the two were working on either separately or together, or both. That being said, it’s inconceivable that the memory sticks would contain the only copies of these documents. Poitras retained copies of everything she gave Miranda. So the British authorities couldn’t possibly destroy the documents; the best they could hope for is that they would be able to read them.

Is it truly possible that the NSA doesn’t already know what Snowden has? Theyclaim they don’t, but after Snowden’s name became public, the NSA would have conducted the mother of all audits. It would try to figure out what computer systems Snowden had access to, and therefore what documents he could have accessed. Hopefully, the audit information would give more detail, such as which documents he downloaded. I have a hard time believing that its internal auditing systems would be so bad that it wouldn’t be able to discover this.

So if the NSA knows what Snowden has, or what he could have, then the most it could learn from the USB sticks is what Greenwald and Poitras are currently working on, or thinking about working on. But presumably the things the two of them are working on are the things they’re going to publish next. Did the intelligence agencies really do all this simply for a few weeks’ heads-up on what was coming? Given how ham-handedly the NSA has handled PR as each document was exposed, it seems implausible that it wanted advance knowledge so it could work on a response. It’s been two months since the first Snowden revelation, and it still doesn’t have a decent PR story.

Furthermore, the U.K. authorities must have known that the data would be encrypted. Greenwald might have been a crypto newbie at the start of the Snowden affair, but Poitras is known to be good at security. The two have been communicating securely by e-mail when they do communicate. Maybe the U.K. authorities thought there was a good chance that one of them would make a security mistake, or that Miranda would be carrying paper documents.

Another possibility is that this was just intimidation. If so, it’s misguided. Anyone who regularly reads Greenwald could have told them that he would not have been intimidated — and, in fact, he expressed the exact opposite sentiment — and anyone who follows Poitras knows that she is even more strident in her views. Going after the loved ones of state enemies is a typically thuggish tactic, but it’s not a very good one in this case. The Snowden documents will get released. There’s no way to put this cat back in the bag, not even by killing the principal players.

It could possibly have been intended to intimidate others who are helping Greenwald and Poitras, or the Guardian and its advertisers. This will have some effect. Lavabit, Silent Circle, and now Groklaw have all been successfully intimidated. Certainly others have as well. But public opinion is shifting against the intelligence community. I don’t think it will intimidate future whistleblowers. If the treatment of Bradley Manning didn’t discourage them, nothing will.

This leaves one last possible explanation — those in power were angry and impulsively acted on that anger. They’re lashing out: sending a message and demonstrating that they’re not to be messed with — that the normal rules of polite conduct don’t apply to people who screw with them. That’s probably the scariest explanation of all. Both the U.S. and U.K. intelligence apparatuses have enormous money and power, and they have already demonstrated that they are willing to ignore their own laws. Once they start wielding that power unthinkingly, it could get really bad for everyone.

And it’s not going to be good for them, either. They seem to want Snowden so badly that that they’ll burn the world down to get him. But every time they act impulsively aggressive — convincing the governments of Portugal and France toblock the plane carrying the Bolivian president because they thought Snowden was on it is another example — they lose a small amount of moral authority around the world, and some ability to act in the same way again. The more pressure Snowden feels, the more likely he is to give up on releasing the documents slowly and responsibly, and publish all of them at once — the same way that WikiLeaks published the U.S. State Department cables.

Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported on some new NSA secret programs that are spying on Americans. It got the information from “interviews with current and former intelligence and government officials and people from companies that help build or operate the systems, or provide data,” not from Snowden. This is only the beginning. The media will not be intimidated. I will not be intimidated. But it scares me that the NSA is so blind that it doesn’t see it.

_________________________________________________________________________

Executioner1


Related articles

| UK: Detention of David Miranda – is this a disturbing use of State power?

Posted on by
3

Detention of David Miranda – is this a disturbing use of State power? ~ 

Law and Lawyers.

Detention of David Miranda – is this a disturbing use of State power?

BBC 19th August – David Miranda detention: MP asks for explanation and see Cameron proves Greenwald right.

A new week opens with a disturbing story about the use of Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act.  The Guardian – Glenn Greenwald: detaining my partner was a failed attempt at intimidation – tells the story of how David Miranda was detained for 9 hours at Heathrow Airport without access to either a lawyer or others.   This post takes a brief look at the Schedule 7 power to question.

It is as well to begin with the Terrorism Act 2000 s.1 where the word ‘terrorism’ is defined for the purposes of law in the UK.   In this Act “terrorism” means the use or threat of action where –

(a) the action falls within subsection (2),

(b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and

(c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.

Actions within subsection 2 are those where the action – (a) involves serious violence against a person, (b) involves serious damage to property, (c) endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action, (d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or (e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

The word ‘action’ includes action outside the UK and the word ‘government’ extends to the government of the United Kingdom, of a Part of the United Kingdom or of a country other than the United Kingdom.

Terrorism Act 2000 s.40  is where the term ‘Terrorist’ is defined and, under s40(1)(b), it means a person who is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

Schedule 7 is headed Port and Border Controls.  This gives an ‘examining officer’ power to question a person for the purpose of determining whether he appears to be a person falling within s40(1)(b).  The officer may exercise his powers whether or not he has grounds for suspecting that a person falls within s40(1)(b).  The person may be detained for questioning for up to 9 hours from the time his examination begins.  Schedule 8 applies to such detention.  The use of Schedule 7 may or may not result in the arrest of the person –section 41.

Hence, on its face, the authorities are empowered to detain and question a person for 9 hours regardless of whether they have any suspicion relating to that person.  The questioning has to be aimed at determining whether the person is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

Why was Mr Miranda questioned?  Glenn Greenwald’s article offers a possible clue:

‘David had spent the last week in Berlin, where he stayed with Laura Poitras, the US filmmaker who has worked with me extensively on the National Security Agency stories. A Brazilian citizen, he was returning to our home in Rio de Janeiro this morning on British Airways, flying first to London and then on to Rio. When he arrived in London this morning, he was detained.’

The activities of the National Security Agency (USA) and its British counterpart GCHQ have been in the news extensively in recent weeks -Watching the Law – International Big Brother.  This prompted Foreign Secretary William Hague to assert in the House of Commons that British security services had acted within the law – Statement of 10th June.    On 17th July, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) said that it was satisfied that UK security services did not break the law by accessing personal data through the US Prism programme – STATEMENT of Sir Malcolm Rifkind (the ISC’s Chairman).

The extent of governmental surveillance activities over citizens is a matter of enormous public concern and investigative journalists are keen to raise awareness of any such surveillance programmes.  It would be shameful if the Schedule 7 power were being used as a method of intimidation of either journalists or those connected to journalists such as members of their families.  Greenwald stated:

If the UK and US 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. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world – when they prevent the Bolivian President’s plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today – all they do is helpfully underscore why it’s so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.

Schedule 7 has been the subject of reports by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation:

Schedule 7 is the subject of a challenge before the European Court of Human Rights – (here).  In May 2013, the court declared the case admissible – see the admissibility judgment Sabure Malik v UK.

Joshua Rozenberg – David Miranda Detention: Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act explained 

Note:  Schedule 7 of the anti-social behaviour, crime and policing bill, which has completed its committee stage in the House of Commons, would cut the maximum period to six hours and introduce other safeguards.

________________________________________________________________________
RuleOfLaw1
Related articles

Executioner1