The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

14 SHOOT THE MESSENGER

It was a Sunday morning in the English countryside, and two middle-aged men were blowing up an inflatable canoe. One was 59-year-old Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian. The New Yorker magazine describes him thus: ‘He wears square, black-framed glasses and has a mop of dark hair that sprawls across his head and over his ears. He could pass for a librarian.’ Rusbridger’s companion was his friend Henry Porter. Porter, aged 60, writes for Vanity Fair and the Observer; he publishes thrillers and campaigns for civil liberties.

The two journalists were acting out a mildly eccentric boyhood dream – to paddle up the Avon in Warwickshire, savouring the tranquil sights of the riverbank. They set off from Stratford-on-Avon, home of the Bard. They hoped for moorhen, ducks and maybe even a vole. This trip could have come straight from the pages of Scoop, a delicious novel about the press by the English satirist Evelyn Waugh.

Scoop’s journalist hero William Boot pens nature columns for a living. ‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’ was one of his more famously memorable lines. When Boot is sent to cover a war in far-off Africa he takes with him an inflatable canoe. (Boot was modelled loosely on Bill Deedes, legendary editor of the Daily Telegraph, who in 1935 arrived to cover the war in Abyssinia with a quarter of a ton of baggage.)

Rusbridger’s canoeing weekend was intended to be a break from the gruelling demands of editorship. It didn’t last. Still on the riverbank, he answered his mobile phone. Police had arrested David Miranda, the 28-year-old partner of Glenn Greenwald, at Heathrow airport! They were holding him under schedule 7 of the UK’s Terrorism Act! They had confiscated his rucksack!

The terrorism law, enacted in 2000, is aimed at killers. It is designed to allow police to stop possible jihadists or IRA members planning bombings, as they enter Britain. It is a draconian piece of legislation: no ‘probable cause’ or specific suspicion is needed. The purpose of the stop is a grave one: to assess whether someone may be involved in the ‘commission, instigation or preparation of acts of terrorism’.

Miranda wasn’t a terrorist. The British authorities knew that perfectly well. He was the partner of a journalist. They suspected he was in fact carrying copies of Edward Snowden’s NSA and GCHQ files, which Greenwald was engaged in researching and publishing. Their prime purpose, as they were later to admit, was simply to get hold of the files, and find out how much Greenwald knew.

On 11 August, Miranda had set off from their home in Rio de Janeiro to Berlin, flying via Heathrow. He spent several days with Greenwald’s fellow journalist Laura Poitras in the German capital. They discussed film projects. He did some sightseeing. He spent a couple of nights in a hotel. He was now flying home, again via the UK. The British and Americans had him under surveillance – possibly even the same spooks who had bugged Angela Merkel’s phone.

The heavily encrypted Snowden files Miranda was carrying formed the basis of Greenwald and Poitras’s numerous articles for the Guardian and for other international publications, including France’s Le Monde, Germany’s Der Spiegel, the Washington Post and the New York Times. One of the files was an index, compiled by a piece of specialised software, to Greenwald’s 58,000 GCHQ documents. There was also further encrypted material. A passphrase to the index was scribbled down and carried in Miranda’s wallet.

Rusbridger knew nothing about the details of Miranda’s journey. Greenwald had booked Miranda’s flight through the paper’s New York office, as part of the steady stream of research the paper was financing. It was one of the perils of working with freelancers: the Guardian was picking up the bills, but it wasn’t always calling the shots.

In moments of crisis Rusbridger radiates calm. The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta calls him ‘unflappable’. Profiling him, Auletta wrote that Rusbridger’s mild-mannered appearance is deceiving; underneath he is steely. One of his tasks as an editor is to apply himself in a calm manner to multi-dimensional problems.

The Snowden story was certainly one of those. On his iPad, Rusbridger carried a sprawling spider diagram linking the diverse issues around the Snowden material. They were legal and editorial. And physical – the need to keep the material safe. There were multiple actors in different jurisdictions; precarious alliances between the Fourth and Fifth Estates. Seemingly the spy agencies were now actively bugging Guardian contributors. This made communication difficult.

During his 18 years as Guardian editor, Rusbridger had run numerous big stories. He had presided over its transformation from a left-leaning British niche print title to a global digital brand. In 2009 the Guardian had uncovered rampant phone hacking in Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire, and brought about the closure of his tabloid News of the World followed by a dramatic series of arrests. In 2010 Rusbridger published the pioneering WikiLeaks documents. But the Snowden story was the biggest of all.

The editor’s immediate problem was how to help Miranda. Police had held him at Heathrow airport since 8.05am. Under the Terrorism Act they could detain him for nine hours. Rusbridger phoned Gill Phillips, the Guardian’s in-house head of legal. She was in a village in Wiltshire. Too far from Heathrow. Phillips called Bindmans, prominent solicitors specialising in civil liberties. One of them, Gavin Kendall, scrambled to the airport.

In the meantime, Rusbridger and Porter spent the next four hours paddling along the Avon. They were heading downstream from Stratford to Bidford, a village where William Shakespeare is said to have crashed out under a crab-apple tree after a drinking competition. The editor kept his phone in a waterproof bag; every so often he would unzip it, to get updates.

Miranda describes his ordeal in detention as ‘intimidating, stressful and deeply frightening’. Police had demanded passports of all passengers as they came off the BA plane; when they reached Miranda, they led him in silence to a custody suite. There, they told him he was being examined under anti-terrorism legislation. ‘This made me very afraid,’ Miranda says. ‘When I heard “terrorism” I was really shocked and told them I had nothing to do with terrorism.’

The two examining officers told him that if he didn’t answer their questions he would go to prison. They rifled through his backpack. They seized his possessions – a Samsung laptop, personal photos, DVDs. They also took two highly encrypted thumb drives and a hard drive.

Miranda wanted Greenwald to be phoned, as his lawyer. Police refused on the grounds that Greenwald was not a UK-registered lawyer. They offered him a call to a duty solicitor, which Miranda refused, suspicious of an unknown person. He had no interpreter. Eventually, the police did call Greenwald in Brazil – waking him at 6.30am Rio time, 10.30am in the UK – and told him Miranda was being held as a terrorist. ‘I was deeply upset, shocked and worried for him,’ Greenwald says.

The two police asked virtually nothing about terrorism. They didn’t inquire if Miranda were a member of a terrorist group. Miranda says the questions he was asked ‘seemed random and unfocused… They gave me the impression that they were questioning me just to give themselves time to examine the material.’

Documents obtained in the subsequent legal proceedings from MI5, the British security service, explain this lack of curiosity. MI5 and the NSA decided several days earlier to have Miranda stopped at Heathrow and his documents seized. They knew for certain he was carrying the data – either through intercepts or an informant – and were desperate to find out how much Snowden had leaked. For the spies, it was an extraordinarily lucky opportunity. But they seem to have been anxious not to let Miranda and his friends realise they had been betrayed.

On 15 August – three days before the stop – MI5 contacted the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism command, SO15. The agency requested detective superintendent James Stokley to have Miranda grabbed. The agency filled in what is known as a ‘ports circulation sheet’ (PCS) with the official request. In a box which asked the author to confirm that possible terrorism was involved, MI5 wrote: ‘Not applicable.’

Unfortunately, the police had only one power to search and seize passengers’ baggage without the need to give any sort of a reason. This was schedule 7 of the act. A controversial clause, regularly the subject of complaints that it was being abused, schedule 7 nevertheless had certain technical requirements. It could only be used to assess whether someone was involved in ‘acts of terrorism’.

The police pointed out the problem. MI5 redrafted the PCS form. Twice. In its final version MI5 claimed: ‘Intelligence indicates that MIRANDA is likely to be involved in espionage activity which has the potential to act against the interests of UK national security… We assess that MIRANDA is knowingly carrying material, the release of which would endanger people’s lives. Additionally the disclosure, or threat of the disclosure, is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism and as such we request that the subject is examined under schedule 7.’

It was an absurd account. It was written to mimic the wording of the language in the act defining ‘terrorism’. But of course, the authors knew it was not Miranda’s intention to make threats to endanger anyone’s life, least of all to achieve some ‘ideological objective’. The definition in the act was supposedly aimed at a fanatic who threatened to blow up a plane.

MI5 explained their anxiety: ‘Please do not make any reference to espionage activity. It is vital that MIRANDA is not aware of the reason for this ports stop. We would be grateful if this stop could be made to seem as routine as possible, and that it appears that this stop is not at the request of the Security Service.’

The use of schedule 7 against someone who was known not to be a terrorist was a blatant abuse – and an alarming precedent in which a government matched journalism with terrorism. This was the first time the much-criticised section of the act had been used against a journalist carrying source material. Coming on top of the forced destruction of the Guardian’s computer on 20 July, it looked like a chilling attack on press freedom.

During its dealings with the Guardian over the summer, Downing Street had never once suggested that the newspaper was engaged in terrorism. ‘If there had been a real risk of a terrorism-related offence, one would have expected a prompt application for an injunction,’ Rusbridger says. Under the UK’s 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, journalistic material enjoys protection. MI5 should have got a judge to approve Miranda’s detention. Instead it circumvented court procedures by using anti-terror laws.

Miranda was eventually released without charge at 5pm, and encouraged to board a flight – minus his stuff – back to Rio. His lawyer only managed to see him an hour before the nine hours were up. (Only one in 2,000 people stopped under schedule 7 are held for more than six hours. He was one of them.) News of his detention set off an international firestorm. The Brazilian government expressed ‘grave concern’. It said the use of schedule 7 in this case was ‘without justification’.

Back in Rio, Greenwald met an exhausted Miranda at the airport, with cameras looking on. Greenwald characterised his partner’s ordeal as a ‘failed attempt at intimidation… This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their [the US and UK’s] attacks on the newsgathering process and journalism,’ he wrote. He added emotionally, in terms that were perhaps somewhat over the top: ‘Even the mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they feel threatened by.’

The allegation that Greenwald and co were pushing a ‘political or ideological cause’, in much the same way as al-Qaida, caused civil liberties campaigners to express outrage. If true, this was an alarming threat to democracy, the group Liberty said. In Brussels there was astonishment. The Council of Europe, which polices human rights, wrote to home secretary Theresa May. It asked May to explain how Miranda’s treatment was compatible with article 10 of the European convention on human rights, guaranteeing freedom of expression.

A telling commentary came from Lord Falconer, the Labour minister who had helped introduce the Terrorism Act. ‘The state has exceeded its powers in this case,’ he said. ‘I am very clear that this does not apply, either on its terms or in its spirit, to Mr Miranda.’

May, however, was unapologetic. So was Oliver Robbins, the deputy national security adviser who had forced the Guardian to bash up its own laptops. Lawyers acting for Miranda challenged his detention in the High Court. In a blistering affidavit, Robbins said the Snowden disclosures had hurt national security. He offered no proof but accused Greenwald of ‘very poor information security practice’.

This was ironic: it was the British agency GCHQ that had lost control of sensitive information, not the Guardian. Robbins made no mention of the UK’s dysfunctional intelligence-sharing deal with the NSA, which apparently meant thousands of American officials – and passing private contractors – could read top-secret GCHQ files.

Two days after police scooped up Miranda, Rusbridger reacted by telling the story for the first time of what had happened in the Guardian’s basement – the hot, messy work of pulverising hard drives. The paper’s Simon Jenkins described the episode as the ‘most bizarre act of state censorship of the internet age’; the two GCHQ boffins who supervised the destruction were ‘like so many book burners sent by the Spanish inquisition’.

Wherever he went the Guardian editor carried a small piece of destroyed computer in his inside pocket, rather as a medieval pilgrim would cherish a saint’s bone. ‘It’s a sort of artefact, a symbol of the role of the state versus the journalist,’ he says.

Rusbridger’s revelations and the absurdity of the Miranda affair had had a galvanic effect on British politicians. It was as if a jolt of electricity at last stirred a body that had previously been in a state of comfortable slumber. Since the Guardian published its first NSA article on 5 June, the story had ignited a debate across the world. In Germany, there was uproar; in the US, Congress was reviewing oversight; in Britain… torpor. Most MPs and newspapers ignored it. A handful of Conservatives batted the news away with the phrase ‘spies spy’. Downing Street said: nothing to see here.

Why this silence? There was one immediate explanation. When the Snowden revelations began, the secretary of Britain’s unique DA notice organisation, retired Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance, secretly circulated a letter among the BBC and the newspapers, on 7 June 2013, reminding them to be mindful of national security issues. He was issuing the notice on GCHQ’s behalf.

His ‘Private and Confidential’ letter said: ‘There have been a number of articles recently in connection with some of the ways in which the UK intelligence services obtain information from foreign sources… The intelligence services are concerned that further developments of this same theme may begin to jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel.’

The DA notices, a rusty hangover from the cold war, are supposed to be voluntary advice; and they are supposed to protect patriotic media organisations from inadvertently publishing sensitive military information. In practice, the notices, with their hint of menace should they be defied, serve as a good way of closing down, or at least dampening, public debate. Those media who reported the Snowden disclosures at all, therefore, initially did so in a subdued fashion, particularly the state-funded BBC. The DA notice kept down the British public temperature.

There were further, cultural, reasons. Britain did not endure the same 20th-century totalitarian nightmare as Germany, or Nazi- or Soviet-occupied countries. The British took freedoms for granted. There hadn’t been a revolution since 1688, and that bloodless one didn’t really count. Moreover, spies in British popular culture were always the good guys: James Bond in the racy fantasies of Ian Fleming, or the dedicated professionals from the BBC TV drama Spooks.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland observes that Britain ‘has a fundamentally different conception of power to, say, the United States’. It doesn’t have a Bill of Rights or a written constitution, or the American idea that ‘we the people’ are sovereign. Rather, the British system still bears the ‘imprint of its origins in monarchy’, with power emanating from the top and flowing downwards. Britons remain subjects rather than citizens. Hence their lack of response towards government intrusion.

‘It’s not the old stiff upper lip of stoicism that you’re seeing, but a shrug of resignation and a habit of deference so deeply ingrained we hardly notice it,’ Freedland argues.

In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, the citizens are happy to chew soma, a drug that confers bliss and forgetfulness. Apart from a few troubled intellectuals – alpha specimens such as Bernhard Marx – the inhabitants of Huxley’s London of the future are content playing Obstacle Golf, engaging in promiscuous sex or watching Feeling Pictures. The summer of 2013 in Britain felt a bit like that to those writing about Snowden’s disclosures.

As more alarming details emerged of GCHQ’s mass capture of data, however, some stirred and opened their eyes. They began to wonder if the system that was supposed to oversee the UK’s spy agencies might be in need of reform. The system wasn’t working. The former cabinet minister Chris Huhne revealed that the cabinet hadn’t been told about TEMPORA, which was tested in 2008 and fully implemented in 2011. Huhne sat in on the National Security Council. But even he and other members were in the dark. So who signed off on it?

Apparently, the spy agencies had briefed no politician other than foreign secretary William Hague about their new, aggressive powers. They effectively misled a parliamentary committee that was busy scrutinising the government’s communications data bill. The Home Office proposed it. The bill would have allowed the police, the security services and other national agencies to get access to all British metadata and emails on a massive scale. And the companies would have to keep data available for their trawling for 12 months. The bill was killed off in spring 2013 following a revolt by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and David Cameron’s coalition partner.

The political wrangling over the bill – dubbed the snoopers’ charter – was largely a sham exercise, it now emerged. Secretly, GCHQ was already doing a version of what the bill envisaged. The agency had kept quiet. A joint memo from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ made no mention of mass data collection. Legislators felt duped.

‘I think we would have regarded this as highly, highly relevant,’ the Tory peer Lord Blencathra – David Maclean when he was an MP – said. He added: ‘Some people were very economical with the actualité.’

With a few exceptions, the opposition Labour party was surprisingly silent on the issue. The Labour leader Ed Miliband said nothing of substance. Labour was in government when GCHQ trialled TEMPORA. Miliband’s brother David was foreign secretary between June 2007 and May 2010 under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. According to the documents, David Miliband signed the secret certificates in 2009 giving GCHQ legal cover for their bulk fibre-optic cable hacking.

Another watchdog that failed to bark, or even growl, was the Commons intelligence and security committee (ISC), the parliamentary body that oversees the UK’s three spy agencies. Its chair, Sir Malcom Rifkind, hadn’t heard the name TEMPORA before the Snowden revelations – though he does maintain he knew of GCHQ’s broad surveillance powers. He also sniffs at disclosures of cable-tapping, and says this practice has gone on since the second world war.

Rifkind personifies the problem with the ISC: that it is a tame creature of the executive, and not the public. Rifkind is a former Conservative party foreign secretary and defence minister. When in government he received briefs from MI6, the agency he is now supposed to drag to account. The prime minister hand-picked the ISC’s members, vetting anyone likely to cause trouble. In the words of Huhne, ‘All its MPs are paid-up members of the security establishment.’

From the outside the ISC looks weak, too close to government, and reluctant to grill Britain’s securocrats. It has a small team of part-time staff and only nine cross-party members. This lack of clout raises the question of how it can provide credible oversight. (The three agencies have a £2 billion budget and 10,000-plus staff.) Rifkind shrugs this off. He says the ISC got new powers in early 2013, reports to parliament, and can now force the spooks to hand over material. Its budget also went up from £700,000 to £1.3 million, he says.

Arguably, the ISC’s biggest weakness is that its members are not… well, getting any younger. Most are in the twilight of their political careers. Like Dianne Feinstein, the 80-year-old chair of the Senate intelligence committee, Rifkind isn’t exactly a child of the internet age. As supposed regulators, can they really decipher highly complex and technical documents? Rusbridger cites the example of a very senior member of the British cabinet who had followed the Snowden stories only hazily and whose main experience of intelligence seemed to date back to the 1970s. ‘The trouble with MPs,’ this senior politician admitted, ‘is most of us don’t really understand the internet.’

In the Snowden files, GCHQ types boast of Britain’s flexible surveillance laws and comparatively weak regulatory regime – a ‘selling point’ for the Americans. (The other two advantages, according to a top-secret 2013 GCHQ document, are the UK’s ‘geography’ and ‘partnerships’.) The UK’s legal regime isn’t merely open to elastic interpretation. It was drafted in an analogue age, well before the explosion in technology and Big Data.

Under the outdated 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), the only legal control on what GCHQ can do with their vast pool of purloined data is a secret certificate, signed by the foreign secretary of the day. This lists the categories under which GCHQ can run searches of their own database. The NSA’s access to the British data, however, seems only limited by a ‘gentleman’s agreement’. And, as everyone knows, spies are not gentlemen.

In the year 2000, when RIPA was enacted, the massive global shift in telecommunications to a network of submarine fibre-optic cables was just starting to take place: but no ordinary civilian could have envisaged that the obscure RIPA regulations would allow GCHQ to break in to the swirling internet. Buffering, to provide a holding pool for the flowing streams of global data, wasn’t even possible until 2008–9. The idea of ‘collecting all of the signals all of the time’ would have seemed meaningless. Online communication and social media were in their infancy. As the technologies raced ahead, Britain’s spying law remained silent – and permissive.

The former director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, says that these ‘blinding transformations’ have rendered RIPA and other intelligence legislation ‘anti-modern’.

As far as the spooks were concerned, however, no changes were wanted. David Cameron, William Hague and other government ministers asserted – somewhat childishly – that Britain had the best oversight regime in the world. They insisted there was nothing to debate. The only thing to talk about was the perfidious behaviour of the Guardian which – no concrete examples were ever given – had helped the bad guys.

One senior Whitehall figure called Snowden a ‘shit-head’. Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, branded him and Julian Assange ‘self-seeking twerps’. (Dame Stella was at a literary festival, promoting her new career as a writer of spy novels.) Snowden hadn’t acted out of patriotic reasons. He was a narcissist, a traitor and quite probably a Chinese agent, the officials fumed. A more subtle critique, expressed by one neo-con, said Snowden had acted from a sense of ‘millennial generational entitlement’.

In October 2013, Andrew Parker, MI5’s new boss, used his first public appearance to berate the media for publishing Snowden’s leaks. He didn’t need to mention the Guardian by name, but said the disclosures had handed ‘the advantage to terrorists… We are facing an international threat and GCHQ provides many of the intelligence leads upon which we rely. It causes enormous damage to make public the reach and limits of GCHQ techniques,’ he said. Another unhappy insider claimed ‘our targets are going dark’. He argued: ‘If you talk about your SIGINT capabilities you don’t have any SIGINT capabilities.’

Did these claims stack up?

Nobody was disputing that Britain and the US had plenty of enemies – terrorists, hostile states, organised criminals, rogue nuclear powers and foreign hackers intent on stealing secrets and making mischief. Nor did anybody object to individual targeting: this was what the spy agencies did. The problem was with strategic surveillance, the non-specific ingestion of billions of civilian communications, which Snowden laid bare.

The government’s claims of damage were always un-particularised. Without any accompanying detail they were impossible to prove, or disprove.

The novelist John Lanchester – who spent a week trawling through GCHQ’s secret files – cast doubt on whether publishing information on broad surveillance powers really helped al-Qaida. He noted that Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad didn’t even have a telephone line running into it, let alone email, computers or mobile phones. Clearly the bad guys have known for some time that electronic communications might be intercepted. As Lanchester writes, bin Laden’s lack of electronic footprint was itself dodgy: a sign to the spies that Something Was Up.

Nigel Inkster, the former deputy head of MI6, came to a similar conclusion. ‘I sense that those most interested in the activities of the NSA and GCHQ have not been told much they didn’t already know or could have inferred,’ he said.

But for Britain’s right-wing newspapers the claims by the security agencies were hallowed fact. And an opportunity to smite the Guardian, a paper deeply unpopular on Fleet Street since its revelations of phone hacking. The scandal had brought the prospect of state-backed regulation of the newspaper industry much nearer, something the Sun, Daily Mail and Telegraph bitterly oppose. All ignored the Snowden leaks. It could be charitably argued that it was difficult for rival newspapers without access to the documents to cover the story.

In the wake of Parker’s speech, the Daily Mail led a furious patriotic assault on the Guardian, calling it ‘The paper that helps Britain’s enemies.’ It was, the Mail said, guilty of ‘lethal irresponsibility’. Journalists were incapable of deciding questions of national security, it added, raising the question of what the Mail would have done if it had got hold of the Snowden files. All in all it was a curious abnegation of journalism from a newspaper that in other contexts vigorously asserts the principles of independence and press freedom.

The rest of the world, however, took a different view. Some two dozen respected editors from a range of international titles defended the Guardian, and the role of the press in informing the public and holding those in power to account. Some of the titles – the New York Times, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel – had done their own reporting on the Snowden leaks. Others – such as Haaretz, the Hindu, El Pais – hadn’t. But all acknowledged that the disclosures had stimulated legitimate debate – over the role of spy organisations and the ‘proper perimeters for eavesdropping’, as the Times’s Jill Abramson put it.

For the Germans there were echoes of the ‘Spiegel affair’ of 1963, when the Spiegel’s legendary editor Rudolf Augstein was arrested and jailed for publishing defence leaks. It was a key test for West Germany’s postwar democracy: Augstein was freed and the Bavarian defence minister who imprisoned him, Franz Josef Strauss, resigned. The smashing up of the Guardian’s laptops was front-page news all across Germany.

Siddhartha Varadarajan, the editor of the Hindu, meanwhile remarked that the details of snooping exposed by newspapers are ‘not even remotely related to fighting terrorism’.

He wrote: ‘Osama bin Laden did not need Edward Snowden’s revelations about PRISM to realise the US was listening to every bit of electronic communication: he had already seceded from the world of telephony and reverted to couriers. But millions of people in the US, UK, Brazil, India and elsewhere, including national leaders, energy companies and others who are being spied upon for base reasons, were unaware of the fact that their privacy was being compromised.’

None of this permeated to Downing Street. The prime minister instead chose to shoot the messenger. He dropped ominous hints that charges could follow if the Guardian carried on publishing. In a speech in Brussels, Cameron said that he couldn’t afford to take a ‘la-di-da, airy-fairy’ view of the work of the intelligence services, a dangerous choice of words for an old Etonian. Cameron dodged awkward questions about whether Britain was complicit in the bugging of Angela Merkel’s phone.

A previously obscure Tory MP, Julian Smith, suggested the paper had compromised the identities of British agents (it hadn’t) and ‘stands guilty potentially of treasonous behaviour’. Smith’s campaign would have had more credibility were it not for a gaffe of his own. He hosted a visit to parliament by staff from Menwith Hill, the NSA’s super-secret facility in North Yorkshire in his constituency. Afterwards, Smith, MP for Skipton and Ripon, posed with intelligence staff outside the Gothic building. Smith put the photo on his website. The identities of NSA and GCHQ employees were there for all to see. Smith said they had consented to the picture.

The British strategy was to talk tough on security, while ignoring the more embarrassing revelations of GCHQ spying on friends and allies. In November, the affair spilled from parliamentary committee rooms, bowled along the Thames, and reached the neo-Gothic portals of the Royal Courts of Justice. Court 28, next to the cafe, was the venue for a two-day judicial review. Outside fell a fine London drizzle. Inside the courtroom bewigged barristers leafed through their files. One QC had a book titled Blackstone’s Guide to the Anti-terrorism Legislation; a British flag above a balustraded building adorned its cover.

Lawyers acting for Miranda were challenging the use of schedule 7 powers to detain him over the summer. A coalition of 10 media and free speech organisations supported Miranda. The Brazilian was the claimant; the Home Office and police defendants. Three judges, led by Lord Justice Laws, were hearing the divisional court case.

Matthew Ryder QC set out the facts: Miranda was in transit between Berlin and Rio when counter-terrorism police stopped him at Heathrow. He had been carrying journalistic material. Articles based on this material had revealed previously unknown US–UK government mass surveillance, and had started an ‘international debate’. The authorities had abused Miranda’s right to freedom of expression. Their actions had been disproportionate, wrongly purposed, and incompatible with counter-terrorism law.

The three judges, however, seemed unimpressed with Ryder’s reasoning. Lord Justice Laws interrupted repeatedly. His courteous interventions showed a twinkling intelligence. But it was clear the judge didn’t know a great deal about the internet. The three judges were in their mid or late sixties. When Miranda’s barrister mentioned the NSA’s PRISM program, Laws interjected: ‘It means they [the security services] can’t read the terrorists’ emails!’

Laws also took a dim view of investigative journalism. ‘I don’t really know what is meant by the term “responsible journalist”,’ he mused at one point. ‘It doesn’t make a journalist omniscient in security matters… It’s just rhetoric really.’

The other judges, fellow members of the establishment, had little sympathy with Snowden, or his situation. ‘There must be a quid pro quo about Snowden sitting in Russia. It’s an obvious thought,’ Mr Justice Ouseley chipped in.

‘Why is Russia allowing Snowden to stay? Snowden is in Russia with encrypted stuff. Does it not cross Snowden’s mind that the Russians might want to decrypt it?’ Judge Openshaw said.

It looked an uphill struggle to persuade the judges of the key point behind the case. Greenwald put in a statement saying: ‘The most serious and problematic aspect of the defendants’ response to this claim is their equating of publishing articles based on national security material with acts of terrorism.’

The authorities were having none of this. The Home Office said it had acted in the interests of national security. The authorities had wanted to know ‘where Mr Miranda fitted in the broader Edward Snowden network’. The journalists involved weren’t motivated by public interest but were ‘advancing a political or ideological cause’.

The day after the review finished – with Laws and co retiring for some time to consider their judgement – the action moved back to Westminster, and to a committee room of parliament. The 2013 James Bond movie Skyfall features M – the head of MI6, played by Judi Dench – giving evidence at a public inquiry. A group of MPs from the ISC lob hostile questions at her. (They are fed up because MI6 has lost a hard drive containing the names of undercover agents…)

Dench’s/M’s public grilling gets worse. The film’s bad guy is a renegade MI6 officer, Raoul Silva, played by Javier Bardem with psychopathic glee. Bardem/Silva bursts into the room, dressed as a policeman. He opens fire. Fortunately James Bond (Daniel Craig) arrives to rescue his boss. The ISC’s chairman, Gareth Mallory (the British actor Ralph Fiennes), proves useful in a tight spot. He shoots several bad guys.

The real-life ISC’s first public hearing on 7 November was a more sedate affair. Seated around a horseshoe-shaped table were Sir Malcom Rifkind and nine MPs and peers. There was no Bond villain. Instead, a flunkey in a gold chain opened the door for the committee’s star witnesses. The three heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – Andrew Parker, Sir John Sawers and Sir Iain Lobban – sat in a row. Behind them were other officials from Whitehall’s twilight world (and a huge bodyguard, no doubt armed with an exploding pen).

Previously the ISC’s meetings with UK intelligence chiefs had been held in private. This one was televised live – or almost live. There was a two-minute delay on the TV feed in the unlikely event someone blurted out a secret. Opening the 90-minute session, Sir Malcolm hailed the hearing as a ‘significant step forward in the transparency of our intelligence agencies’. He omitted to mention that the chiefs had secretly got the questions in advance. Inevitably journalists went with the same tired intro. The spies were coming out of the shadows!

Anyone who had hoped Lobban and co might shed light on the Snowden revelations was to be disappointed. In broad terms, the service chiefs defended their mission – its legality, appropriateness, targets and methods. For much of the session, it appeared that Snowden didn’t exist. Asked how a ‘junior clerk’ had managed to gain access to GCHQ’s secrets, Parker said British agencies had ‘stringent security arrangements’.

Rifkind inquired: ‘Can we assume that you are having discussions with your American colleagues about the hundreds of thousands of people who appear to have access to your information?’

Parker replied: ‘All three of us are involved in those discussions.’

If anyone had been fired over GCHQ’s debacle we never found out. Nor was there any explanation of how the NSA allowed the biggest leak in the history of western intelligence to take place.

Rifkind asked another question. It was the equivalent of a friendly tennis player lobbing the ball up in the air so his partner could smash it. ‘Why do you think it is necessary to collect information on the majority of the public in order to protect us from the minority of potential evil-doers?’

Lobban replied with his favourite analogy – the haystack. He said: ‘We don’t use our time listening to the telephone calls or reading the emails of the vast majority.’ Instead, GCHQ was engaged in ‘detective work’. It needed access to ‘an enormous haystack’ – the communications on the internet – in ‘order to draw out the needles’. The GCHQ boss offered a defence of his staff. They were, he said, patriotic and motivated by finding terrorists and serious criminals.

‘If they were asked to snoop, I wouldn’t have the workforce. They would leave the building,’ Lobban said.

There would be a gradual but inexorable darkening of GCHQ’s knowledge of its targets, Lobban added. Over the previous five months potential terrorists had chatted on an almost daily basis about how to adapt their methods of communication, he said. (Clearly, though, GCHQ could still listen in on them.)

It was left to Sawers, the real M, to attack the evil-doers of the moment: the global media. In a confident and suave performance, Sawers said the Snowden revelations had been ‘very damaging… They have put our operations at risk. It is clear our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee. Al-Qaida is lapping it up.’ He offered no details.

Some ISC members did gently press the three chiefs. Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary, asked if it were credible that legislation passed in 2000 was ‘fit for purpose in the modern world’, given that the agencies’ capabilities had ‘developed so hugely’ in the meantime. Sawers and Lobban said they were prepared to accept changes to their legal framework, but that it was up to politicians to propose them.

Overall, the hearing was cosy.

An American or European visitor would have been struck by what the committee didn’t ask. It barely touched on the substantive issues raised by the Snowden documents, and skated over any serious questioning about mass surveillance, civil liberties and privacy. There were no questions about GCHQ’s reported role in tapping British traffic between Google’s own data servers. There was nothing on the bugging of Chancellor Merkel’s phone, or spying on friendly world leaders. Nothing either on the reliance on corporate telecoms partners who offered help ‘well beyond’ what they were compelled to do.

The previous week Sir Tim Berners-Lee – the man who invented the internet – had described the UK–USA’s secret efforts to weaken internet encryption as ‘appalling and foolish’. Nobody asked about this either.

It was left to Rusbridger to point out the obvious to his critics. Snowden – luckily – had entrusted his files to journalists. They had worked conscientiously (in consultation with governments and agencies), disclosing only a small proportion of what he had leaked. It was the media that had, paradoxically, saved the intelligence agencies from a much greater catastrophe.

If governments, officials and spy chiefs wanted to kick newspapers, that was their prerogative. But they should consider what the next leaker might do in the absence of professional journalist outlets. He or she might just dump everything out on the uncensorable worldwide web. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ the editor warned.

There was a coda to all this. In early December 2013, the action shifted back to parliament. The home affairs select committee – chaired by a plummy-voiced Labour MP, Keith Vaz – summoned Rusbridger to explain himself. This, in itself, was an odd request: in mature democracies newspaper editors didn’t usually have to account for editorial decision-making before legislators; that was, after all, what freedom of the press meant.

Nonetheless, Vaz suddenly asked Rusbridger: ‘Do you love this country?’ The chair’s intention may have been helpful rather than hostile. But the question had an unmistakably McCarthyite hue about it. Rusbridger replied in the affirmative, saying that he was ‘slightly surprised to be asked this question’, then adding: ‘But yes, we are patriots and one of the things we are patriotic about is the nature of democracy, the nature of a free press.’

The editor gave a calm account of the Guardian’s journalistic processes over the previous six months – the responsible way it had handled Snowden’s files, its 100-plus interactions with government, and the enormous public-interest dimension that drove publication. The Tory MPs on the committee had another angry agenda, however. It was to toss Rusbridger in jail.

The most bizarre line of questioning came from Conservative MP Michael Ellis. As part of its coverage, the Guardian had reported that GCHQ had a branch of the gay pride organisation Stonewall; this information was on Stonewall’s website. Evidently furious, Ellis accused Rusbridger of transmitting stolen material and revealing the ‘sexual orientation’ of persons working at GCHQ.

‘You’ve completely lost me, Mr Ellis. There are gay members of GCHQ. Is that a surprise?’ Rusbridger said. Ellis replied: ‘It’s not amusing, Mr Rusbridger.’ He bafflingly accused the paper of betraying further secrets by reporting that GCHQ staff with their families had visited Disneyland Paris.

These contributions from the Guardian’s political enemies may have been wild and not a little silly. But the British criminal investigation into the Snowden affair was real enough. Speaking to the same committee, Cressida Dick, assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, confirmed that detectives were investigating whether ‘some people’ had broken the law. Specifically section 58a of the Terrorism Act. This said it was an offence to communicate any information about intelligence staff ‘likely to be of use to terrorists’. Not just secret info but anything at all: photos, addresses, even the name of their cat.

Dick said: ‘We need to establish whether they [some people] have or haven’t. That involves a huge amount of scoping of material.’

The journalists who published the Snowden revelations had been involved in the most thrilling story of their careers. It was in the public interest. Now, it seemed, they were suspects.