My part in Jair Bolsonaro’s downfall

When I first began writing about politics in 2005, my Brazilian husband, David Miranda, was not remotely interested in the subject. When politicians or journalists would visit us in Rio and invite us to dinner, he would always try to get out of it: ‘I’m not going; you’ll talk about nothing but politics the whole night and I will be desperately bored.’ In 2013, David was detained at Heathrow under the Terrorism Act 2000. I’d been working on the Edward Snowden story, uncovering the extent to which the NSA and GCHQ surveil their own citizens, and David had travelled to Berlin to help with a documentary about the investigation. British intelligence learned he would be travelling back home through London and detained him, threatening to arrest him, before eventually releasing him. After a few weeks back in Rio, David was still furious. Countless American and British journalists with far more proximity to the Snowden story had travelled through Britain without the slightest problem.