MP: newspapers ‘helped terrorists’ by publishing leaks

 
Harassed: Glenn Greenwald, left, and David Miranda at Rio de Janeiro airport
21 August 2013

British newspapers were today accused of publishing material that will help terrorists as the row over the whistleblowing leaks of American Edward Snowden intensified.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the head of Parliament’s security watchdog, said there was “no question” that reports published in the Guardian and elsewhere about Mr Snowden’s cache of secret documents had revealed details of intelligence operations which would make it harder to monitor terrorists.

He also hit out at the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger, saying that he was on “weak ground” over his handling of “stolen” documents and was in no position to judge whether the data posed a threat to national security.

The attack by Sir Malcolm, a former foreign secretary who now chairs Parliament’s intelligence and security committee, came as controversy grew over the Met’s detention of David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald — who revealed the Snowden leaks — at Heathrow as he travelled to Brazil and GCHQ’s role in the destruction of Guardian hard drives storing data from the whistleblower.


In a BBC interview, Mr Miranda claimed that he had been repeatedly threatened with prison if he failed to disclose his email and social media passwords.

It also emerged today that Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, had contacted the Guardian in a bid to persuade it to surrender material leaked by Mr Snowden before the paper gave in and allowed GCHQ officials to oversee the destruction of its computers.

Civil liberties campaigners and some MPs have denounced the authorities’ actions in both cases, but Sir Malcolm today said: “ There’s no question that the various press reports of some of the Snowden leaks — what Snowden has given to various newspapers in the United States and the United Kingdom — gave information about the way in which intelligence agencies are able to access emails or telephone calls by people who they suspect are terrorists, procedures that are much more sophisticated than perhaps terrorists understood. Terrorists will have picked up that information and will have responded accordingly, and potentially made it more difficult if they have access to that information.

“Neither Mr Snowden nor the editor of the Guardian, or any other editor of any other newspaper, is in a position to necessarily judge whether the release of top secret information may have a significant relevance in the battle against terror.

“I think Mr Rusbridger ... is on relatively weak ground. He clearly did not dispute that he had no legal right to possess the files or the documents that were being discussed.”

Mr Rusbridger said that he only agreed to the “pointless” destruction of the hard drives to avoid a legal battle and because the information was already stored overseas. He questioned whether Sir Malcolm was suitable to chair Parliament’s security watchdog.

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