EUROPEAN EDITORS DENOUNCE MIRANDA DETENTION

The recent detention and nine-hour interrogation of David Miranda, the partner of Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, by British authorities may undermine “the position of the free press throughout the world,” the editors of newspapers in each of the Scandinavian countries have said in an open letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron, published in the London Sunday Observer. “We are surprised by the recent acts by officials of your government against our colleagues at the Guardian and deeply concerned that a stout defender of democracy and free debate like the United Kingdom uses anti-terror legislation in order to legalize what amounts to harassment of both the paper and individuals associated with it,” the letter also said. Meanwhile, in Berlin the American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has been working with the Guardian‘s Greenwald and former NSA employee Edward Snowden to expose U.S. surveillance activities, also denounced the escalating efforts of the U.S. and Britain to prevent further disclosures. Referring to the government-ordered destruction of hard drives at the newspaper’s offices in London recently, Poitras wrote in the German magazine Der Spiegel that the devices contained information about how British authorities and British telecommunications companies work together to spy on global communications. “Revealing the secret partnerships between spy agencies and telecoms entrusted with the private communications of citizens is journalism, not terrorism,” she wrote. “The U.K. government’s destruction of material provided by a source to a news organization will surely be remembered as [one] of the most blatant government attacks on press freedom.”