Adviser to UK Govt Says David Miranda Had Documents That Threatened National Security

Reason

An adviser to the British government claims that material seized at London's Heathrow airport from David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, could threaten British national security and lead to "widespread loss of life."

From Bloomberg:

Documents seized from the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald might threaten U.K. national security, damage the economy and lead to "widespread loss of life," a government adviser said.

The information, taken from David Miranda on Aug. 18 at Heathrow Airport, "is highly likely to describe techniques which have been crucial in life-saving counter-terrorist operations" and could identify British intelligence agents abroad, Oliver Robbins, a U.K. national security adviser, said in documents released during a court hearing in London today.

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Comments

[kinnath]

Next week, the UK issues arrest warrants Miranda and his co-conspirators.

[kinnath]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut.....alist.html

The U.K. is now considering prosecuting Miranda under the country's Official Secrets Act and Terrorism Act for his role transporting the trove of files

One cannot even be snarky these days.

[sticks]

Then why did they let him go?

[Cascadian Ephor Xenocles]

Because he's a dangerous criminal. You don't want to mess with those.

[Copernicus]

"Then why did they let him go?"

Amazing, no?

They had no reason to detain him, yet supposedly upon finding he was a massive threat to life, the economy(?), (and I assume our precious bodily fluids) they released him.

[Episiarch]

could threaten British national security and lead to "widespread loss of life."

Uh huh. And I've got some property in the Everglades that I'd love to sell you.

[Pro Libertate]

Your python ranch? I thought it was doing well.

[jesse.in.mb]

If you'd step up your franchising there'd be a better market for python.

How am I supposed to sate my craving for serpent flesh when I have to fly cross country to get it?

[Pro Libertate]

Look, it's about quality control. Python doesn't travel well. Not dead, anyway.

There's a proposal to deliver live pythons through sewer systems throughout the U.S.

[jesse.in.mb]

Can't you just put them on a plane?

[Brandon]

Is PL Elon Musk?

[Pro Libertate]

Wouldn't that shake your world view?

[JW]

The Pythonloop?

[Pro Libertate]

Is that trademarked?

[jesse.in.mb]

Wouldn't that just be an ouroboros?

[Dweebston]

More of a partly-inverted caduceus, otherwise you're wasting unused track that could run the return car.

[Ted S.]

I always thought Python travelled just as well as Perl or C++.

[Warty]

my craving for serpent flesh

Must...not...make..obvious...joke...

[Pro Libertate]

Oddly, Mountie Python is wildly popular among the gay and lesbian community. Our ad agency is unsure why that is. They had a theory, but that didn't work for the lesbians, they said.

[The Rt. Hon. Serious Man, Visc]

It's a front, it's actually his headquarters from where he's plotting world domination. Henchmen who fail him and secret agents that try to stop him get fed to the pythons.

[Pro Libertate]

That's a vicious lie spread by our competitors. Human is very bad for python meat quality. Um, so I hear.

[The Rt. Hon. Serious Man, Visc]

The pythons don't actually eat them, they just strangle them and the bodies decompose in the swamp.

[Pro Libertate]

What's the point of that? You know nothing about raising livestock in controlled environments, do you? Everything is controlled down to the least detail, like strippers massaging the pythons with bourbon-covered tits.

[The Rt. Hon. Serious Man, Visc]

Your lack of humility before nature is staggering. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you want to sell it.

[Pro Libertate]

You sound just like that quantum physics guy we hired. . .who died in a tragic python accident.

I suppose this is a bad time to mention that we're genetically altering the pythons?

[The Rt. Hon. Serious Man, Visc]

You sound just like that quantum physics guy we hired. . .who died in a tragic python accident.

Or he didn't.

I suppose this is a bad time to mention that we're genetically altering the pythons?

Well you're a lawyer at a park with genetically altered reptilians

[Pro Libertate]

In the book, he was a hero, you know.

[Dweebston]

For God's sake, I hope you steralized your specimens, or at least quickened only the females.

[Dweebston]

sterilized, ffs.

[Ted S.]

Do you have Tiffany and Debbie Gibson on retainer?

[Res Publica Americana]

Her Majesty's government wants to keep its dirty laundry hidden? NO WAY!

[Tim]

The message is clear: everybody having anything to do with Snowden will be ruined.

[The Rt. Hon. Serious Man, Visc]

The information, taken from David Miranda on Aug. 18 at Heathrow Airport, "is highly likely to describe techniques which have been crucial in life-saving counter-terrorist operations" and could identify British intelligence agents abroad, Oliver Robbins, a U.K. national security adviser, said in documents released during a court hearing in London today.

So why didn't you charge him for espionage?

[Tim]

We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those
responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked
have been sacked.

[Pro Libertate]

A M??se once bit my sister.

[Agammamon]

". . . could threaten British national security and lead to "widespread loss of life."

You know what?

I Don't Believe You

[Agammamon]

Fething automated formatting.

[Aresen]

...could threaten British national security and lead to "widespread loss of life."

If you define "threaten national security" as "be so embarrassing for the powers-that-be that they would have to commit suicide", I suppose that might be true.

[Killazontherun]

OT, but God damn. Psychotics on the rampage in Germany.

Police storm homeschool class, take children by force
'Officers brought a battering ram and were about to break the door in'

http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/pol.....-by-force/

The shocking raid was made solely because the parents were providing their children's education, HSLDA said. The organization noted the paperwork that authorized police officers and social workers to use force on the children contained no claims of mistreatment.

"The children were taken to unknown locations," HSLDA said. "Officials ominously promised the parents that they would not be seeing their children anytime soon."

The raid, which took place Thursday at 8 a.m. as the children were beginning their day's classes, has been described by observers as "brutal and vicious."

A team of 20 social workers, police and special agents stormed the family's home. HSLDA reported a Judge Koenig, who is assigned to the Darmstadt family court, signed an order authorizing the immediate seizure of the children by force.

It's nearly impossible to do this justice without Godwinning the thread.

[Res Publica Americana]

The day cops come to my home to abduct my children is the day the street we live on runs red with blood.

[Cascadian Ephor Xenocles]

Good thing they banned Nazi iconography in Germany.

[Res Publica Americana]

You wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between the Gestapo and these cops.

[Episiarch]

All the volk must be educated together! Or, all das volk muss zusammen erzogen werden!

[Pro Libertate]

Nazikinderm?dchen.

[Episiarch]

What's this about Madchen Amick?

[Pro Libertate]

Yes, I believe that's the archetype of the volk Nazi nanny.

[Killazontherun]

It's for the children that they learn to submit:

"Citing the parents' failure to cooperate 'with the authorities to send the children to school,' the judge also authorized the use of force 'against the children' ? reasoning that such force might be required because the children had 'adopted the parents' opinions' regarding homeschooling and that 'no cooperation could be expected' from either the parents or the children," HSLDA said.

[Res Publica Americana]

Straight from fucking Orwell. Way to go, Europe.

[ant1sthenes]

"Citing the parents' failure to cooperate 'with the authorities to send the children to school,' the judge also authorized the use of force 'against the children' "

Well, if nothing else, it might help the case of the people seeking asylum in the U.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is totally different from...that one thing the Germans used to do. You see, unlike the raids before, usually launched against the enemies of the master race, this raid was against the enemy of the people: homeschoolers. How else will children learn to be properly socialized if we don't corral them into a government-approved building for 8 hours a day? How else will we have workers for the mines, soldiers for the armies, and clerks for the offices if the government doesn't create them at an early age?

[Killazontherun]

Yes! Outside NYC isn't it mostly about people wanting to indoctrinate their children in obscurantist religious doctrines?

If you live on the inside do you have to be as mendacious and ignorant as the person who wrote this? I hope not. I've looked in to the private schools in my area, most are not religious affiliated and the Methodist one is part of Wake Forest University, there is also at least one Catholic one, neither by the way are exactly obscurant.

[Killazontherun]

Wait. Is she being sarcastic? This being Slate I assumed not, it's Assburger central, but maybe someone got this passed their detectors. Couldn't be that hard to pull off. Come on, getting drunk at trailer parks as an educational alternative to Whitman? It sounds like something I would say to dick around.

[np]

If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person

And apparently, you are also morally bankrupt if you do.

[Aresen]

Ken Popehat took that down very thoroughly:

http://www.popehat.com/2013/08.....ad-person/

[R C Dean]

Shorter article: You must sacrifice your children for the collective. For the children.

[Invisible Finger]

Didn't someone named Abraham have to do that a few thousand years ago? (Somewhere on Highway 61?)

We've made no progress.

[Killazontherun]

You see that motherfucker coming, you better run!

[Invisible Finger]

Apparently moral bankruptcy is how you get elected to seats of power in the USA. Who knew?

[Rrabbit]

The article contains some blatantly obvious errors. For example this one:
"Germany's World War II-era requirement that all children submit to the indoctrination programs in the nation's public schools"

The compulsory school attendance in Germany goes back to the first half on the 18th century. It was, for example, listed in the 1919 Constitution, Article 145.

No, this is not something the Nazis introduced.

Under current German law, it is a per state law, where different German states have different laws, but all of them have at least nine years of compulsory school attendance.

[R C Dean]

Compulsory attendance and mandatory indoctrination sessions/curricula are two different things.

[Aresen]

Yeah, it goes back to Freddy the Great, the epitome of autocrats.

(I wonder, however, if that itself wasn't a reaction to various petty nobles who did their best to prevent the peasants from being educated. - pure speculation on my part as I haven't read much on Frederick.)

[Rrabbit]

In Prussia, it seems to have been Wilhelm von Humboldt rather than Freddy the Great. But before Napoleon, Germany consisted of literally thousands of individual states and city states, and many of them did their own thing.

[Invisible Finger]

An adviser to the British government claims that material seized at London's Heathrow airport from David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, could threaten British national security and lead to "widespread loss of life."

So someone WITH ZERO CREDIBILITY cries "wolf!"

[Suthenboy]

I hate coming late to threads. Nothing I can say here that hasnt already been said.

Lying liars lying again, yet the majority with buy it and breath a sigh of relief that the sinister Greenwald has been foiled.

[ant1sthenes]

could threaten British national security and lead to "widespread loss of life."

True, MI6 might have to kill a bunch of people who have access to the information.

[Pinky]

"...might threaten U.K. national security, damage the economy and lead to "widespread loss of life," a government adviser said"

Being as the material they confiscated from Miranda was encrypted, the operative word here is "might". They haven't got a fucking clue what is in the data they found. Since they don't know what is there their accusations are pure fiction theatre. They are simply branding Snowden and any of his associates enemies of the people. The good news here is that no real lasting harm has been done by their actions, but they've made apparent their intent and tactics. It's likely no one with any sense will play into their reach again.

[Jake W]

I hate being part of the small minority of people that know this is bullshit; everything is bullshit anymore. This reads like something from a dystopian fantasy: In the news today, rebel "Alpha 7116" was captured transporting horrible terrorist documents for terrorism, that would have lead to the death of everyone had they been in his possession any longer. All hail our glorious, effective leaders and their wise policy.