I don’t understand why this article so carefully avoids the word “spouse”. I had no idea what kind of partner David Miranda was – business, romantic, or marriage – for most of the article. The story only hinted at the meaning in the third-to-last paragraph, about “detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists”. Was this just bad editing, or does nobody talk about “business partners” any more?
Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
261–270 of 463 posts
Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
#262Disclaimer: This is largely speculative and WHOLLY me playing devil's advocate. I do not condone this sort of behaviour by my government. Could the case be made that journalists are legitimate targets for investigation following on from Manning and Snowdon? My focus here is less on terrorism and more towards counter-intelligence. Were I a rival nation-state I would see an intelligence-gathering opportunity in what's…
If you believe that the security interests of the state should always take precedent, then this argument could be made. However, this is of course a totalitarian position.
Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
#263I stopped reading when he implied that the US was behind it. GB is a sovereign country, and still a democracy. If you don't like the fascist laws people are voting for, stop voting for them. If you blame some outside party, you're just passing the buck and making excuses why you can't convince people to grow a spine and stop voting for the status quo -- "oh, my people would never put up with this, but the big bad USA is forcing us to". If your politicians have signed you up to be the enforcers for a little mafia protection racket, maybe they shouldn't be in office.
Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
#264I was just saying on a post the other day how badly the government(s) are losing the PR battle. Quite amazing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223584
Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
#265The salient quote from Greenwald's article on this: They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name. [1] This is a great example of why we should treat terrorism lik…
I think the officials who do things like this should be prosecuted under the same terrorism laws they're supposed to be enforicing. This is clearly an act of terrorism on the part of the NSA and GCHQ.
Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
#266They do it because they can and they learned that the public will scream for a few days and move on with their daily problems soon after.
It's sad, very sad. I am pessimistic and I have an impression looking at how Obama and co. are lying without any consequences, what NSA has being doing and other recent examples, that we lost that war and we have no tools to fight against it.
Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm kind of confused by what you consider the "general public" here. Right now, in addition to this being the top story on HN, it is is on the default reddit front page at #9 and rising. It's also on the front page of the New York times website, and also in the top three headlines at news.google.com. Google reports 25 articles most being published in the last hour. By these measures, it seems to me that a lot of peop…
Neither the BBC, Independent, The Sun nor Daily Mail report on it; q.e.d., the "general public" doesn't care. Edit: The Sun does, however, have boobs on its homepage, the Daily Mail talks about celebrities and the BBC's international site talks about Syria, Gibraltar and Usain Bolt, with its England page concerned with assisted suicide, a rider who died after a horse accident, something about climate activists and th…
It's now the second-to-top story on the www.bbc.co.uk website
Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were able to do two things: 1) Spend 9 hours pressing the guy in order to learn any details they are interested in. He was probably not prepared enough for that, most of people aren't. Apparently, in such an occasion you don't even have the "right to remain silent!" That is, Mr. David Miranda had no Miranda rights there. I guess they had a good laugh. 2) Get anything from the electronic devices. It's reasonable…
> That is, Mr. David Miranda had no Miranda rights there. I wasn't aware that Brazilian citizens detained in the UK had rights granted by the US.
I suspect that sentence was included primarily for the joke.
Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
#269For me the most absurd thing is that all this erosion of peoples rights and several wars have been justified by the threat of terrorism.
I'm not going to even bother finding some statistics to post right now but the actual threat of terrorism is vanishingly small. For example in 2012, more Americans died crushed by their TVs or furniture than from terrorism.
http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/stats-on-human-rights/sta...
Re: Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
The intent was quite likely to intimidate other journalists, whistle blowers, or just people in a position to help them. It could also have been to make more public that Greenwald has a younger gay Brazilian partner, something we gloss over in this crowd, but for which he'll be judged harashly for in other social circles. I don't think it was a coincidence that Greenwald was contacted when Miranda was detained. Whoev…
> It could also have been to make more public that Greenwald has a younger gay Brazilian partner, something we gloss over in this crowd, but for which he'll be judged harashly for in other social circles. Well, it's not like the Guardian is really terribly popular amongst bigots, anyway... If he wrote for the Daily Mail I could see your point.
The irrational (but very real) reasoning goes like this:
Glenn reported on the NSA leaks. Glenn is gay. Everything gays do is wrong, therefore reporting on the NSA leaks is wrong. Also, supporting gays is bad, because someone might think you're gay. Therefore supporting NSA leakers is bad.
Where Glenn works is irrelevant. The NSA probably wants to discredit everyone involved, and garner as much support for themselves as they can.