Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper Tuesday night about his partner David Miranda’s nine-hour detention in London’s Heathrow Airport, excoriating British authorities for equating journalism to “terrorism.”
Greenwald said that U.K. authorities’ seizure of a laptop, thumb drives, and other materials from Miranda amounted to “criminalizing” journalism. Miranda was detained under Section 7 of the nation’s Terrorism Act while he was en route to Brazil after picking up the materials in Germany from Greenwald’s colleague Laura Poitras, who assisted him on stories about National Security Agency surveillance programs.
“If you want to start criminalizing that, it means that you’re asking as a citizen to be kept ignorant and to allow people in power to conceal what they’re doing behind a wall of secrecy and to have no accountability or transparency,” Greenwald told Cooper. “Journalism is not a crime and it’s not terrorism.”
“I truly believe they will come to regret what they have done,” Greenwald later added. “Aside from being oppressive and dangerous, it’s also quite incompetent and really quite dumb.”
Watch the interview below, courtesy of CNN:
