Journalist working on NSA spying story held at Heathrow under UK terror law

GAC said:
so what did this guy potentially have on him then ? codes to nukes or something, if its just the chance he may have info of us spying on various countries then im sorry everyone already knows that everyone is spying on everyone else.
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We don't know but it doesn't have to be at either extreme does it.

GAC said:
now if its the chance the info could damage people hunting terrorist again how does this damage the uk
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What a totally stupid thing to say. Anything that undermines their capacity is potentially damaging. Now whether it does some 'greater good' and should be done anyway is a different point which you can't address as you don't know the actual details.

GAC said:
it doesnt as the police and anti terror unit have shown how inept they are at dealing with known terror cells in the uk after 7/7 when they had them under surveillance and did NOTHING, let alone the farce that is Anjem Choudary a known terrorist recruiter and lunatic but left on the streets and who keeps coming up time and again after somethings happened but yet is left alone.
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They are never going to get it perfect are they? They are never going to stop every attack it is childish and naive to think they have that potential and that from one mistake they should be penalised irrespective of the successes that never get detailed.

Well people like Human Rights and people like Mr Choudary like to hide behind those rights they would never have in Islamic countries. And who's not to say the Mr Choudary is giving them a wealth of information and they actually want him on the streets.
 
Well personally I think that the greater good is not having these overly broad powers and for governments not to snoop on the whole populace directly or by proxy.

We have always had terrorism, we have always had outrages. Some plots will succeed. It depends whether your individual freedoms and right to privacy should override the security services mandate to prevent terrorist outrages. I think that largely they should.

Back in the day, with Baader Meinhof, the IRA, the red army faction, black september etc. terrorism was fought with intelligence, policing and courage to a large extent. Now with a monolithic information gathering of largely mundane material in vast amounts and the attempts to ever increase this stockpile, I doubt that the success rate has improved substantially if at all.

If it where not for the whistleblowers, we would not be informed, not so much about the content of the material held, but the scope of the acquisition. Full power to thier elbow I say for this alone.
 
GAC said:
technically he wasn't entering the uk, he was transferring planes which makes this even more odd. and now its on the news from the met saying it was all legal, fine show us why he was picked up then and i bet they cant.
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Apparently, it's justified... Which means there is even more reason to junk the law as too draconian.

There's only so many times the government can tell us it's for our own good and we dont understand... Show us why it is needed, don't just cloud it all beneath the secrecy excuse.
 
Nutella33 said:
http://www.businessinsider.com/guar...nce-agents-destroyed-their-hard-drives-2013-8

looks like the guardian had their hard drives destroyed as well, which as well as having happy fun times of a police state shows a remarkable lack of knowledge on propagation of files. dropbox anyone?
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I think that was one of the reasons the guardian allowed it... One of the editors wrote a piece about it and just pointed out they were going to write the stories from another country instead...
 
All governments are like this though. Documents under the domain of National Security have to be protected from open disclosure. If the documents become known then national security is threatened (e.g. operating interests abroad are threatened, agents exposed)

Every country has a cloak and dagger arm that is secret..that operates in the shadows...this is part of life.

I suppose the problem is when that government decides to engage in very dodgy international espionage or sickening immoral practices which it knows its own citizens would object to if they were to become publicly known it is imperative it remains a secret. For our own good. They do things we would find abhorrent...but they do it so we can live in apparent peace. This is a global strategic game with lots of players.

The rights of the individual are not sacrosanct when balanced against national security.

Perhaps its an idea to somehow learn how a party would act when in government when operating in the shadows....as well as the light of day. But i guess that would defeat the purpose of it...

In some ways you can almost draw parallels with the human mind. The conscious and the unconscious...some trauma the conscious mind is protected from because it would overwhelm it.
 
All governments are like this though. Documents under the domain of National Security have to be protected from open disclosure. If the documents become known then national security is threatened (e.g. operating interests abroad are threatened, agents exposed)
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I don't see the Germans or french doing this and they were shown to be colluding just as much.

Every country has a cloak and dagger arm that is secret..that operates in the shadows...this is part of life.
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no-one is denying this. intimidation of family and destruction of documents (no matter how pointless an attempt) is a worryingly easy step they have taken for a secret that has already been leaked. if they have more stuff to leak the americans know what it is anyway as they seem to have traced snowdens access, so there was no need for this.

no one is saying we should shut down GCHQ/MI5/MI6 and publish where our nuclear subs are.

They do things we would find abhorrent...but they do it so we can live in apparent peace.
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thats quite a leap of faith there. i doubt all of the secret operations of governments are entirely altruistic. governments are not perfect in public, what makes you think they will be in private?

The rights of the individual are not sacrosanct when balanced against national security.
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depending entirely if it is actually a threat and what the detention of a family member with a Brazilian passport would do to solve this.
 
Now our government of spies and the blackmailed have made the Guardian destroy their computers that might have Snowden related info on them, the guy lives in Russia he stopped in China both countries are allies of the main enemies of the banksters Syria and Iran we can assume they have whatever info they want so the only people the govt are trying to stop gettin the info is the UK population in case we grow to hate our leaders because of their lies, wars and perversions.
 
I somehow get the impression that Snowden would not trust these guys with said info and/or documents if they were jumping on flights all over the place carrying it with them.

I also don't think he would trust them with said info/documents if they were saving them on hard drives in their bloody offices!

One guy mentioned dropbox. Hopefully it was a joke.....

Downing Street denying the order came from them. The whole situation stinks.
 
Don't see the huge issue with them making a stand... yes it might well ultimately be futile given that any data seized etc... is likely stored elsewhere and they might well already know the extent of information that was stolen by Snowden... Still we do have laws over here protecting sensitive information and simply being a journalist doesn't necessarily give you immunity to do whatever you want. This guy had been staying with one person involved in the Snowden story and was traveling to his partner - someone else involved in the Snowden story... its not that unreasonable to suppose that he might well have some files relating to the Snowden story in his possession.
 
National security and anti-terrorism is being abused by the authorities to try and keep people in the dark.

I get the feeling we haven't been told the full story of what these leaks contain and they are panicking to ensure it stays that way.
 
thep02 said:
Now our government of spies and the blackmailed have made the Guardian destroy their computers that might have Snowden related info on them, the guy lives in Russia he stopped in China both countries are allies of the main enemies of the banksters Syria and Iran we can assume they have whatever info they want so the only people the govt are trying to stop gettin the info is the UK population in case we grow to hate our leaders because of their lies, wars and perversions.
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the what?
 
dowie said:
Don't see the huge issue with them making a stand... yes it might well ultimately be futile given that any data seized etc... is likely stored elsewhere and they might well already know the extent of information that was stolen by Snowden... Still we do have laws over here protecting sensitive information and simply being a journalist doesn't necessarily give you immunity to do whatever you want. This guy had been staying with one person involved in the Snowden story and was traveling to his partner - someone else involved in the Snowden story... its not that unreasonable to suppose that he might well have some files relating to the Snowden story in his possession.
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You're forgetting something, the Snowden files relate to US activity not the UK. So why then are we acting on behalf of another country's embarrassment?

I somewhat doubt US airport officials were that bothered by possible IRA members flying in an out of the country in the 80s and 90s. Given they turned a blind eye to the IRA fund-raising jars in various Irish pubs at the time, I wouldn't be surprised if they gave them the red carpet treatment.
 
Anyone remember the Spycatcher saga. British government trying to put the lid on senior civil servant / MI5 officer's memoirs being published overseas.

It is in the internet domain now and whatever they do, the number of copies floating around will be multiplying like topsy.

Having lived through the home grown and middle eastern terrorist episodes in the 70's, I do not see that the public is best served by these attempts to monitor all their citizens and also to try and control what they think and do.

It may be the American way to expect the government to ensure absolute safety to their public. In Britain we have always been reliant on ourselves and some low risk of being injured or killed must be worth our freedoms and privacy. Otherwise the terrorists have won absolutely.
 
nkata said:
do not see that the public is best served by these attempts to monitor all their citizens and also to try and control what they think and do.
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No one is trying to control what you think and do... nor is everyone being actively monitored... passive monitoring of internet communication seemingly happens to be useful. For the vast majority of us no one is going to read a single e-mail, text etc... even those that do get read most will likely be disregarded - they don't have that many employees and they're not going to waste time reading joe bloggs e-mails when it turns out he's actually not involved in any dubious Islamic organisations or spying for the Chinese etc...

If you've got the technology to do it then it would be silly not to - its not like us choosing not to monitor communications is going to stop the likes of China, Russia etc.. doing the same.
 
However much I disagree with him being detained under utterly terrible laws, as well as the way the world is treating this entire situation, the response of "you'll be sorry" from him and Snowdon is incredibly childish.

Just release the information, he shouldn't need an excuse to release the kind of information he has access to. Acting like he is doing it out of revenge is incredibly petty, it really removes some of the sense that he is doing what he is doing altruistically if he is purposefully keeping this information back and only bringing it out when he feels personally slighted.
 
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Teresa May talking **** saying its a threat to national security, what a load of bull, basically it's a threat to embarrassing the government the fact they have been mining our data online under the guise of terrorism for years, effectively spying on innocent citizens. Even the peer who drafted the terrorism act has come out and said his arrest is an abuse of the legislation and is not legal.
 
The UK is starting to look a lot worse than the US! Ordering the Guardian to destroy the hard drives, using a D-Notice (thanks sniffy) and somehow justifying all of this under the terrorism banner! Lord Falconer saying it was wrong of them to use it this way is icing on the cake.
 
I don't know what Tony Blair was smoking in 1999, but having decommissioned previous and homegrown terrorist threats from the IRA and loyalist Irish, he decides to roll up all the temporary terrorism laws of the last decades and produce this monolith of an act which was largely passed into law without much oversight by friendly select committees and a large majority in parliament.

A vision of 2001, who knows, but he certainly got stuck into that.

Now we have GCHQ sifting the internet connection. Police and security services with huge powers in the name of the terrorism holy ghost and the population told that it is to protect them from evil.

pah!
 
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