Recently we've learned about how Glenn Greenwald's companion David Miranda was hassled at Heathrow Airport in London, about how British security authorities made a show of destroying two Mac Books or hard drives at the London offices of The Guardian, and about how Laura Poitras was shaken down by United States customs every time she re-entered her home country from 2006 to 2012. In each case, the goal seems to have been intimidation, not security.
The British authorities that detained Mr. Miranda may have had a tenable reason to search him and even confiscate every speck of electronics he had with him. But why did they keep him in custody for five minutes short of the nine hours they were allowed before they'd have had to go to a judge to hold him longer? Apparently up to half a dozen men were peppering him with questions for much of that time, often questions unrelated to Mr. Greenwald and The Guardian, much less related to terrorism. And what was the point of keeping him incommunicado for those nine hours, yet phoning Mr. Greenwald to tell him Mr. Miranda was in custody? Was that a way of taunting Mr. Greenwald, "We've got your lover boy, but you can't talk to him, and we're going to wring all the secrets out of him,"?
Now we've learned that two weeks ago, British agents turned up at the London offices of The Guardian and demanded to confiscate or destroy the two gadgets (either hard drives or Mac Books) that allegedly had on them the files that Edward Snowden had passed on to Mr. Greenwald. Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger told the agents the same information was on other storage media elsewhere, but they still insisted on creating a destructive, probably noisy, scene for him to watch. As Ryan Chittum put it in the Columbia Journalism Review,
And so one of the more bizarre moments in The Guardian's long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in The Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.
[snip]
On top of that, Greenwald's paper has been threatened by its own government with prior restraint and had its hard drives smashed in its basement to make a (stupid) point.
This is police-state stuff. We need to know the American government's role in these events—and its stance on them—sooner rather than later.
The third example comes from US customs. As Peter Maass details in "How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets"
http://www.nytimes.com/...
She was taken into another room and interrogated by three agents — one was behind her, another asked the questions, the third was a supervisor. "It went on for maybe an hour and a half," she said. "I was taking notes of their questions, or trying to, and they yelled at me. I said, 'Show me the law where it says I can't take notes.' We were in a sense debating what they were trying to forbid me from doing. They said, 'We are the ones asking the questions.' It was a pretty aggressive, antagonistic encounter."
[snip]
"She said, 'I've had it,' " Greenwald told me. "Her ability to take notes and document what was happening was her one sense of agency, to maintain some degree of control. Documenting is what she does. I think she was feeling that the one vestige of security and control in this situation had been taken away from her, without any explanation, just as an arbitrary exercise of power."
At the time, Greenwald was a writer for Salon. His article, "U.S. Filmmaker Repeatedly Detained at Border," was published in April 2012. Shortly after it was posted, the detentions ceased. Six years of surveillance and harassment, Poitras hoped, might be coming to an end.
As with Mr. Miranda, there may be some security justification for searching Ms. Poitras and her electronics the first few times. But after she's learned to encrypt everything or just not carry it, what's the point? And why hold her for hours in confrontational, antagonistic encounters? They backed off as soon as there was significant adverse publicity. The main thing they've accomplished is given Ms. Poitras a long tutorial in computer security. She's now an expert.
Note that customs started hassling Ms. Poitras in 2006, under the W. Bush administration, but continued until 2012, four years into the Obama administration. Surely Obama could have replaced the folks he inherited from Dubya who thought they should continue with such an abuse of power. If he did, he replaced them with others who thought the same.
All this reminds me of something I heard long ago. I was in college during the LBJ and Nixon years, and got a whiff of the mind-set of oppressive authorities then. Later, during the Reagan administration, I happened to meet a college student one row behind me in an airplane. He was reading a book about I.F. Stone, so I struck up a conversation. We talked about the oppression that was in style at the time. Ed Meese was attorney general, and wanted to make everybody take drug tests. But it seemed he didn't have much idea what to do with the results. His "Justice" Department made vague noises about people who tested positive being sent to rehab programs, that were pretty rare at the time. Meese and company weren't interested in prosecuting, and they weren't interested in setting up more rehab programs. So why do the tests? The young man I'd just met summed it up beautifully:
"They just want to prove they can make you pee in a cup."
So maybe that's it -- the thugs aren't stupid and they know what they're doing has very little to do with security. They're doing it because they get off on proving they can threaten you for hours, or make you pee in a cup.
I hope somewhere in our security agencies we have some people with more serious concerns and more mature motivations, but I've seen nothing lately to reassure me.