Global Post: LONDON, UK — Sometime before a plane from Berlin touched down at Heathrow Airport on Sunday morning, the British authorities placed a call to Washington to report that they would be detaining one of the passengers.
David Miranda, 28, is not a US citizen. However, he is the partner of a person of great interest to both the United Statesand UK: Glenn Greenwald, the journalist reporting on revelations about both countries’ surveillance programs from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Snowden is now in Russia, where he’s been granted temporary asylum.
Britain’s “heads-up,” as a White House spokesman called it, has raised questions about an issue that’s been floating at the edges of the widening debate over the secret information Snowden has disclosed.
When it comes to national security, just how close is the “special relationship” between the US and the UK?
Categories: Americas
The secret services of all Western countries work closely together, as we can see when the NSA spying activities ‘broke’ open. In the past they also cooperated in CIA ‘rendition flights’. One German NATO officer however told me that he was quite ‘upset’ (to use a politer word) with the Americans, as the Germans shared everything, but for the Americans there were different categories, such as ‘secret, top secret, and: for American eyes only’…