Big news broke Sunday evening in the NSA leaks story as the partner of the main reporter at the center of the public disclosure of the classified information was detained at Heathrow airport.  The story begins with David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald who was reportedly en route from Berlin acting as a courier exchanging research documents with a filmmaker in that city.  According to Greenwald, Miranda was also in possession of an encrypted portable computer drive which contained documents and information from Edward Snowden for Greenwald.  Miranda, a Brazilian citizen, was detained and questioned for nine hours before being released without charges.  British authorities also reportedly seized Miranda’s computer, video game, mobile phone, and memory card.  Miranda then flew on to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The questioning came under a British terrorist act called Terrorism Act 2000.  Its enables authorities to question, search, and detain persons at airports, border areas, and ports in investigating possible terrorism.  British authorities have defended the application of this questioning which were brought into question due to Miranda’s Brazilian citizenship.  They called on a duty of protecting the public as justification for these actions and that they believed that Miranda possessed highly sensitive stolen information that could help terrorism.  Miranda is apparently positioning a legal challenge to the detention, and is also trying to stop the examination of the items taken from him.  Such an examination would likely  consist of forensic details, attempts at decryption, and a thorough review of history.

“We’ve sought undertakings that there will be no inspection, copying, disclosure, transfer or interference in any other way with our client’s data pending determination of his judicial review,” Morgan told Reuters.

Further than that, The Guardian itself revealed that legal action was threatened against it unless classified document that Snowden shared with them was either returned to authorities or destroyed.  It’s been reported that Guardian employees did destroy some of this computer information under supervision of government security experts.  Needless to say there are likely copies in any number of places at this point.

The matter appears more and more through these reports like after the fact access control is happening here.  In other words there is a collaborative effort to physically seize the files at the source of these disclosures.  The public may never know everything but it is clear that a growing notion is out there that somehow the ability of the press to report is being curtailed through this detention and destruction of the information.  Greenwald has promised more aggressive stories and disclosure in response to these events and said authorities would regret what they did.  Adding further fuel to the fire is a report that the White House knew that the detainment of Miranda was coming.

These events have surely stoked a bunch of controversy over the freedom of the press, about intellectual property of the United States, the enforcement and collaboration between national allies, and the extent to which they go to in reclaiming the information.  I haven’t even touched privacy matters which the whole country has been talking about for weeks.  We witnessed just last week that WikiLeaks put out a distributed, encrypted “insurance file” – some 400GB in size that has many people wondering what kind of files could be on that scale that would be their trump card.  Very hard to say, lots of theories on that one.  Regardless, if the intent at Heathrow was indeed to investigate terrorism, then many people question the application of that specific action against someone who had some well-distributed but confidential files, unless there is something we don’t know about the parties who have them or further information contained within.  Expect some blockbusters in the coming days from Greenwald who has an even more personal reason to expose all he can.