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Well when we started publishing the Snowden material somebody from the government got
in touch and said he was speaking on behalf of the Prime Minister and wanted a conversation
about how we were going to engineer this and for a while it was a reasonable conversation,
not particularly heavy handed but there came a point where it was accompanied by a direct
ultimatum that if we didn't hand the material back, or destroy it they would go to law.
And I explained to them that Glenn Greenwald, our reporter in Brazil, had a copy and that
there was another copy in America so they didn't see much point in destroying it because
it was it wouldn't stop our reporting but nevertheless they insisted on it or go to
law.
And that's called prior restraint, it is restraining a newspaper before publication and you can't
do that in America and in my view you shouldn't be able to do that in the UK.
This has thrown up the fact that Britain doesn't have a written constitution with the first
Amendment, like America and it still has the ability of the state to march into a newspaper
office and stop reporting and that's just more easily protected, more easily done in
America. So for stories like this if we are threatened we will do it out of America rather
than London in future.
I think to be fair to them they may have had anxieties about Chinese agents, or Russian
agents who might have been surrounding the building and I said we would've been happy
to work with them to achieve security of the documents.
Well I think this is an Alice in Wonderland world because they didn't know what was in
whatever it was that Miranda was carrying and what they've done is to allied journalism
and terrorism and I think this is why this has caused outcry around the world because
what they've done is to use a bit of the law that relates solely to ports and airport landings
so if they'd arrested David Miranda in the carpark in Heathrow he would've had all the
checks and balances that the law has that would allow him to plead journalistic immunity
or special status. Instead of which they use a bit of the terrorism legislation which is
supposedly not for people who are suspected of anything but is supposed to be a random
thing and that gives them the ability to question him for 9 hours without a lawyer and to seize
anything that they want. That seems to me a misuse of a Terror Law to inhibit journalism.
I think what's most sinister is actually less than the destruction of the hard-drives because
that's not going to stop us from reporting. I think what people are beginning to glimpse
is the collaboration between some very, very large tech companies and governments and intelligence
agencies in ways that citizen's had no idea was happening. If you think of what our digital
lives are in 2013, they're basically inside all that. They are collecting, analysing,
storing data on a massive scale and some people will say well that's alright because at the
moment we have nice Mr. Obama and nice Mr. Cameron and we have some sort of oversight
but I think most people in America and Europe are beginning to feel distinctly uneasy about
this deal in which this cosy tech company, intelligence agency, government world and
how it's working but that need for security is any democracy balanced with privacy, liberty,
freedom of speech and you can't have that debate, you can't have the consent of the
public unless they know what's going on.