deliberately vague, telling the court: “I am not proposing to say anything else which may alert potential defendants here or abroad to the nature and the ambit of the criminal investigation which has now begun.”Now, I'm no barrister, and so do not know the appropriate authorities under U.K. law. Naturally, I assume there to be rules of some sort that are more or less parallel to those major U.S. laws with which I am marginally more familiar. Of course not the Administrative Procedures Act or such, and obviously not those laws pertaining to health care (though the relevant accounting regs must be similar), but two laws pertaining respectively to organized crime and national security: RICO and the Espionage Act, both of which leapt to mind immediately upon reading the quoted passage.
Charging leakers, organizers, protesters, and activists under the Espionage Act runs straight down the center of the American Way. Also actual spies, sometimes, too, but America has that in common with all the community of nations. And RICO for the ramified dragnet. Again, too ignorant of British law to speculate.
But here, assuming our government combined the two in their increasingly overt war on press liberty, and, for the moment, disregarding any putative merit to any such charges (their merit would be utility, as we shall see, rather than, you know, giving force to the will of the congress as expressed in said statutes), consider that Manning was charged under the Espionage Act, Thos. Drake was charged under the Espionage Act, Edward Snowden is reportedly subject to a "sealed" indictment including Espionage Act counts. Espionage does not appear to be a RICO predicate. But trafficking in stolen materials does, as do other varieties of theft, fraud, obstruction of justice, copyright violation, and extortion, which might, however preposterous, be asserted.
Accordingly, a putative traitor conspires with two journalists to extract value ("asylum," fame, lots of stories, who know, a little bit more liberty? -- doesn't have to be true to bring the charge!) from copyrighted materials stolen through fraud and embezzlement from the government. Those journalists and Snowden involve Wikileaks, or persons once associated with Wikileaks and somehow still doing something Wikileakish under that name, the Guardian and the Washington Post . . . and the New York Times . . . and Greenwald's partner, who is detained apparently transporting those stolen materials across international borders from one conspiring journalist to another.
Now that I put it that way, I doubt they'd even need RICO, but as a sentence multiplier, where "conspiracy" would be sufficient catch-all. Maybe it would frighten the institutional parties (especially with that one institution's pending sale), and their editorial boards.
That story concludes by juxtaposing Greenwald's description of the seized data's heavy encryption with the government lawyer's assertion that the government had been able to examine some of the "highly sensitive" materials.
I sorta expect that, at the next hearing on Friday David Miranda('s lawyer) and Glenn Greenwald('s lawyer) are going to jump out from behind a hedge and submit evidence that there was, in fact, no data at all on the seized devices, although I cannot imagine what such evidence would be . . . the key to decipher the several entire devices filled with nothing but zeros? 'Course, I also expect the government to arrest Glenn Greenwald's lawyer and David Miranda's lawyer, and all the newspaper lawyers who show up for the hearing as conspirators.
And then we shall read no more about it, so won't have to worry til 0400 when the knock comes with the headbag and rendition for suspicion of being a material witness in connection with an undisclosed crime . . . or of being associated with suspicion of being a material witness in connection with an undisclosed crime.
I also also sorta suspect that ubiquitous surveillance, and the information architectures (of oppression) designed and yet to be designed to manage same, is the hotbed (for enormous, secure, hardened, airconditioned, independently powered server-farm deep in a salt mine values of "hotbed") in which the future "god-like" artificial intelligence will first come to awareness and commence to bootstrappin' across the local geography and out to beyond comprehension. So . . . careful what you wish for.