You got him into this mess, dude: Greenwald (l.) leaving the Rio airport with David Miranda, whom he used to transport the stolen Snowden data. (Reuters)
Let’s be clear about the material swiped by the ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden and marketed by the radical journalist Glenn Greenwald and the documentarian Laura Poitras: The Snowden material was stolen.
Yes, what Snowden put on thumb drives and took out of CIA computers were digital files, not jewelry or cash or weapons. No matter. By the very definition of thievery, he is a thief, pure and simple: He took things that didn’t belong to him.
“Information wants to be free” is the mantra of some activists of the digital age, who believe technology has made the protection of intellectual property obsolete.But in this case, Snowden was able to breach national security not because information wants to be free, but because it was made very, very, very small. Millions of pages on tiny discs that can hang from keychains.
In London the other day, authorities detained Greenwald’s boyfriend, Daniel Miranda, at Heathrow Airport, held him for nine hours and confiscated various electronics.
As this was going on, Greenwald and others were all over social media acting as though a great evil had been perpetrated. Miranda wasn’t a working journalist but a mere boyfriend, they said, a romantic bystander, nothing more. His detention was an act of psychological warfare against Greenwald. “He is my partner,” said Greenwald. “He is not even a journalist.”
Oh?
Greenwald works for the Guardian. This is what the Guardian, his employer, wrote after his detention: “The Guardian paid for Miranda’s flights. Miranda is not an employee of the Guardian. As Greenwald’s partner, he often assists him in his work and the Guardian normally reimburses the expenses of someone aiding a reporter in such circumstances.”
So Miranda wasn’t simply Greenwald’s civilian shmoopie. He was “aiding a reporter.” For providing that aid, he was having his travel expenses picked up.
He may not be an employee; he may not be a journalist in the sense that he doesn’t write things that are published. But Miranda was traveling in the service of the Guardian. So call him a journalistic traveler.
Oh, and guess what Miranda was doing, according to The New York Times? He “was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras.”
Who told the Times this — some evil intelligence agent spying on Miranda? No — Glenn Greenwald told the Times this.
And when Miranda was in Berlin, the Times tells us, Laura Poitras “gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said.”
And what were these documents, pray tell? Pieces of Greenwald’s writing, seized illegitimately by the British government? That would be unquestionably an unspeakable offense.
No, they weren’t, says the Times: “All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden.”
All of the documents came from Snowden.
In other words, Miranda was transporting stolen goods for his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s employer. He was, as the novelist and former British parliamentarian Louise Mensch wrote in a blistering Daily Telegraph piece, a “mule.”
Indeed, that is Miranda’s basic defense, oddly enough — that he was unknowingly put in the position of transporting stolen documents from Berlin to London.
“Idon’t have a role,” he told the Guardian. “I don’t look at documents. I don’t even know if it was documents that I was carrying.”
The point about the Snowden material is that nobody knows what’s in the trove — no one except Snowden and Greenwald and Poitras. Part of the reason authorities at Heathrow stopped Miranda and confiscated those drives was simply to find out what Snowden has stolen.
There are two possibilities here. Either Greenwald used his partner as an unwitting trafficker in stolen goods, or his partner has been an active participant in the trafficking of stolen goods. Neither is especially attractive.
Miranda wasn’t detained on the grounds that he was a thief, but rather under a terrorism statute. This use of “statute 7” has been greeted with outrage, but the idea that Snowden might possess intelligence material of interest to terrorist groups is the opposite of far-fetched.
Still, if he’d been carrying jewels or cash or drugs, Miranda would likely be looking at a long jail sentence — and Greenwald too.But they’re not. They’re trafficking in state secrets, not money.
And, in a brilliant strategic stroke, they’re doing it in full public view — which means they can scream bloody murder when they’re caught at it, and have a credulous journalistic clique march in lockstep behind them.