> He was probably not prepared enough for that, most of people aren't.

For better or worse, Glenn Greenwald is very skilled in these sorts of extended adversarial interviews. As a litigator in civil matters he would spend days being obstructionist in depositions. One of them, involving a dispute with Greenwald's former landlord runs over 500 pages. It was effective enough to get the opposing legal council fired.

So anyone who's working with Mr. Greenwald is probably much better prepared than the average Joe to spend 9 hours being questioned.

I personally suspect this was mostly about getting a look at the electronics Mr. Miranda was carrying. It's basic law enforcement strategy to realize targets will eventually make a mistake and for investigators to put themselves in a position to benefit from that.

> That is, Mr. David Miranda had no Miranda rights there.

I wasn't aware that Brazilian citizens detained in the UK had rights granted by the US.

I suspect that sentence was included primarily for the joke.

Of course they never had. The goal was to point that it's not like in the movies. He can't demand the lawyer, he can't even stay silent. A lot of things to slip the tongue during the nine hours of interrogation. Being detained under terrorist laws, it must have occurred to him that they can even throw him in Guantanamo and claim legality. Intimidation, you bet!

Guantanamo is not a UK facility.

Do you claim that UK doesn't deliver the "terrorist suspects" to the US? Do you claim that US then never places somebody in Guantanamo? Do you claim such order of events is impossible?

How do you propose they forced him to talk? They're interrogators, not torturers. It would be perfectly valid to sit there and refuse to answer questions for 9 hours, if not particularly pleasant.

"If you don't answer our questions, you will be charged and kept here." It's legal in UK for them to actually open the case then.

They just need to play bad cop and very bad cop, most people are not prepared to deal with that kind of psychological pressure.

Consider that Grenwalds partner had a laptop stolen from their house (with nothing else missing) recently after Greenwald had told him he might send him an encrypted copy of the Snowden documents.

I'm pretty sure that Greenwald and Miranda learned to be particularly careful about data integrity after that incident.

1) That's a huge assumption. Especially given that he went to see Laura Poitras

2) Sure, but for that they didn't need to seize them, they could have copied them. I take it that Greenwald et al are smart enough to use an encrypted dead drop on the net rather than to hand-carry unencrypted bits with the keys in the head or the possession of the carrier.

From the government perspective I can see only bad stuff coming from this, it is a very clear abuse of the law, it will take a lot of tapdancing to explain this one away as a rogue employee.

I guess they estimated that there won't be many occasions where they'd have to explain that at all. When the Bolivian president's plane was already taken down, who's gonna react about the "ordinary Brazilian guy" kept on the customs?

Moreover, TSA already prepared the people to be numb about the inconveniences at the airports. It became hard to make news about that.

Not many people can relate to being a head of state, but plenty of people can relate to just being someone else's partner.

Of course I can't possibly know but I agree with @acqq I think the effect of surprise worked and it was all about that in order to grab the hard drive for current and past files and his contact list on his phone. I think that if he was really prepared and if he was expecting such a move he would have tried to avoid Heathrow.

... and wouldn't carry electronic devices except for disposables.