This summer the whole world came to know the name of Edward Snowden who made public the secret materials of US intelligence services. In particular, the world community learned about the PRISM spy program which makes it possible to secretly watch people and monitor almost all Internet services. One of the newspapers that published information from the ex-CIA contractor Snowden is the word-famous British The Guardian. But this has caused problems between this paper and the government in the past few weeks. The British authorities demand that the newspaper either destroy or give them the materials it received from Snowden. “You’ve got your fun. Now we want the stuff back,” The Guardian’s chief editor Alan Rusbridger quotes a British official as saying in his personal column. But the editor refused to cooperate with the government. Then two governmental officials came to the newspaper’s office and destroyed, on their chiefs’ orders, two computers to which Snowden had leaked information.
“I explained to British authorities that there were other copies in America and Brazil so they would not be achieving anything,” Rusbridger said. “But once it was obvious that they would be going to law I preferred to destroy our copy rather than hand it back to them or allow the courts to freeze our reporting.”
Another one who came under pressure is The Guardian’s journalist Glenn Greenwald to whom Snowden had leaked secret information. Greenwald’s friend David Miranda was detained at London’s Heathrow airport. Law-enforcers thought that he knew something about the leaked information and questioned him for nine hours on end. In conclusion, he had all the digital equipment and data carriers seized. Greenwald himself called his friend’s arrest “harassment and intimidation.” Meanwhile, the US government denied its involvement in this arrest.
“The main message of the government (which, incidentally, officially justified the law-enforcers’ actions against The Guardian) is that ‘law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear’ and ‘we have the right to seize any documents if we think this can save human lives.’ Liberal-minded commentators unanimously emphasize that such persuasions are typical of totalitarian countries,” says the London-based Ukrainian journalist Yan LEPETUN. “It is absolutely clear that a major part of British society is calling into question the government’s actions against The Guardian. If detaining a partner journalist is to be considered admissible, you should not be surprised when the state will take a new, more brazen, step to infringe on personal freedoms. There is also another aspect here – the question of London’s independence in its relationship with Washington…”
Can you say that it is an unprecedented instance in Britain when the government orders an independent newspaper to disclose or destroy information?
“No. This pressure is not unprecedented, what is unprecedented is the form in which this was done. The media law is very strict in Britain, and the main mechanism is a court injunction against writing something. This is what governmental bodies, companies, and even sportsmen resort to. There is also such thing as super-injunction, when the media are forbidden even to mention a court ban on writing something. For example, there was a widely publicized litigation between the company Trafigura and The Guardian in 2009. But whether the government will consider destruction of discs a suitable way to dispose of undesired information depends on the way society will respond to the current situation. It seems so far that society has swallowed this, unfortunately. It was interesting to see the media publish photos of the royal baby: even many serious newspapers put this on the front page – rather than the news that The Guardian was forced to destroy the recordings.”
