This week brings to a close an absurdly overblown cause célèbre. The Court of Appeal ruled that David Miranda’s detention at Heathrow three years ago under the Terrorism Act was lawful. He had been part of a professional operation leaking classified information to the Guardian, which compromised British and American national security.
Yet the judgement was hailed as a victory for Miranda because the court also noted that the Terrorism Act didn’t include sufficient protection for journalists carrying sensitive information. It asked Parliament to look again, in order that it be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights — even though, in this case, there was no breach.
This magazine is a staunch defender of press freedom. We have opposed a statutory press regulation body, as recommended by Lord Leveson after his inquiry into phone hacking and the ethics of the press. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes noted a century ago, the right to free speech does not excuse someone who falsely shouts ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre. Neither does the right to a free press extend to the indiscriminate release of secret documents which put agents’ lives in danger, or alert terrorists to the gaps in our capabilities. Only an extremist libertarian, who believed all activities of the state to be illegitimate, could think otherwise.
The Miranda case was never about press freedom. It was about the right of the security services to protect secrets vital to their activities and defend national security. Miranda was arrested because he was the partner of Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian journalist suspected of carrying classified documents from Edward Snowden, the renegade CIA computer engineer who had been granted asylum in Russia. Amnesty International said that the ‘only possible intent’ behind the detention was ‘to harass him’ for no other reason than his personal relationship to Greenwald.
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