Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald has reportedly said he will be more "aggressive" in publishing stories detailing government spying operations after his partner was detained at London's Heathrow airport for nine hours on Sunday, The Associated Press reports.
Greenwald, speaking in Portuguese, told Brazil's Globo TV he is "going to write much more aggressively than before, I’m going to publish many more documents than before," according to the AP's translation.
Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, 28, was reportedly detained under Section 7 of the very broad British Terrorism Act, which allows the authorities to detain someone for up to nine hours to conduct questioning and search personal items to determine possible ties to terrorism.
Miranda, a Brazilian citizen, refused access to a lawyer and authorities confiscated all of his electronic equipment, including encrypted thumb drives carrying leaked NSA documents.
Greenwald told The New York Times that Miranda had spent the previous week in Berlin visiting Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who is also central to Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified NSA documents.
Miranda, whose flights were paid for by The Guardian, was delivering NSA documents to Poitras and receiving different documents from Poitras to give to Mr. Greenwald.
Greenwald called the detainment a failed attempt at intimidation while Michael Mansfield, one of Britain's leading human rights lawyers, called it"sheer unadulterated state oppression."
Others noted the fact that Miranda was carrying classified NSA documents complicates matters.
In a blog post, former senior U.S. intelligence analyst Joshua Foust wrote: "So basically: Miranda was being a document mule for Greenwald and Poitras, and the Guardian was paying for it."
In a previous post Foust noted that while the nine hours of detainment seemed excessive, "it’s a bit difficult to see why anyone would be surprised that he would be at the very least questioned by British authorities."
Greenwald said that his comments on Monday were taken out of context by Reuters and that Miranda's detainment will simply "embolden me, intensify my focus" as opposed to spurring him to publish documents out of vengeance.
“I’m going to publish many more things about England, as well," Greenwald told reporters in Rio de Janeiro, according to the AP. "I have many documents about the system of espionage of England, and now my focus will be there, too."
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