The journalist who’s done most of the first-line reporting on the Snowden saga is a guy named Glenn Greenwald. Over the weekend, Mr Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, was detained upon arriving at Heathrow Airport for nine hours on obviously trumped-up reasons. In the UK, nine hours is the legal max before they must charge you, which is not an amazing coincidence. (Mr Greenwald, an American, and Mr Miranda, a Brazilian, make their home in Rio.)

In addition to being detained, though, the Heathrow officials impounded Miranda’s cell phone, laptop, and memory sticks, ostensibly to search for “terrorism” evidence or some other such bullshit; the real reason for both the detention and the confiscation is obviously to harass Mr Greenwald.

This is complete bullshit.

From Greenwald’s column today:

[T]hey obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop “the terrorists”, and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

Worse, they kept David detained right up until the last minute: for the full 9 hours, something they very rarely do. Only at the last minute did they finally release him. We spent all day – as every hour passed – worried that he would be arrested and charged under a terrorism statute. This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

Before letting him go, they seized numerous possessions of his, including his laptop, his cellphone, various video game consoles, DVDs, USB sticks, and other materials. They did not say when they would return any of it, or if they would.

Fortunately, it’s stirred up quite a bit of inquiry from Labour pols in Britain. What’s not cool is that apparently the White House knew beforehand.

More Guardian coverage here.