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 Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said that he wants to know why police stopped David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. Miranda was held for nearly the maximum time authorities are allowed to detain individuals under the Terrorism Act's Schedule 7, which authorizes security agencies to stop and question people at borders.
Miranda's cellphone, laptops and memory sticks were confiscated, Greenwald said.
"What needs to happen pretty rapidly is we need to establish the full facts," Vaz told the BBC. "Now you have a complaint from Mr. Greenwald and the Brazilian government -- they indeed have said they are concerned at the use of terrorism legislation for something that does not appear to relate to terrorism -- so it needs to be clarified, and clarified quickly."
Miranda, 28, was stopped Sunday while traveling home to Brazil after visiting Germany where he met with Laura Poitras, a U.S. filmmaker who has worked with Greenwald on the NSA story. The Guardian reported it paid for Miranda's flights, but did not immediately respond to a request for elaboration on what his role with the newspaper might be, if any.
Vaz said it was "extraordinary" that police knew that Miranda was Greenwald's partner, and the authorities were targeting partners of people involved in Snowden's disclosures.
"Bearing in mind it is a new use of terrorism legislation to detain someone in these circumstances ... I'm certainly interested in knowing, so I will write to the police to ask for the justification of the use of terrorism legislation -- they may have a perfectly reasonable explanation," Vaz said.
Greenwald has written about NSA surveillance programs based on files disclosed by Snowden, who now has temporary asylum in Russia.
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 Labour Party lawmaker Tom Watson questioned whether Home Office ministers had been told and described the detention as an "an embarrassment to the government."
"What I think we are going to see is this is sort of the intelligence services overstepping the mark_ they are clearly trying to intimidate Glenn Greenwald -- and that's an attack on journalism," Watson told the BBC.
London police acknowledged that they had detained a 28-year-old man at 8:05 a.m. He was released at 5 p.m. without being arrested, the Metropolitan Police Service said.
The Home Office defended Schedule 7 in a report last year, arguing it was designed to help authorities determine whether people crossing U.K. borders have been involved in the "commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism." Border agents are not required to have reasonable suspicion before detaining a traveler.
Under Schedule 7, examining officers may require travelers to answer questions or provide documents. Detainees may be held for up to nine hours if they refuse to cooperate, the Home Office has said.
In most cases, those questioned under Schedule 7 are detained for less than an hour. Less than a tenth of 1 percent are held for more than six hours. Some 230,236 people were questioned under Schedule 7 from April 2009 through March 2012.
[Associated
Press; By DANICA KIRKA]
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