Here's a look back at the Snowden affair (publication of documents about government surveillance) by the then editor in chief of the Guardian, one of the newspapers that took the lead.
Ten years ago, Edward Snowden warned us about state spying. Spare a thought for him, and worry about the future by Alan Rusbridger
"one story the Guardian published 10 years ago today exploded with the force of an earthquake.
"The article revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. In case anyone doubted the veracity of the claims, we were able to publish the top secret court order handed down by the foreign intelligence surveillance court (Fisa), which granted the US government the right to hold and scrutinise the metadata of millions of phone calls by American citizens.
...this was but the tip of a very large and ominous iceberg.
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"the Guardian (joined by the Washington Post, New York Times and ProPublica) led the way in publishing dozens more documents disclosing the extent to which US, UK, Australian and other allied governments were building the apparatus for a system of mass surveillance
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"It led to multiple court actions in which governments were found to have been in breach of their constitutional and/or legal obligations. It led to a scramble by governments to retrospectively pass legislation sanctioning the activities they had been covertly undertaking. And it has led to a number of stable-door attempts to make sure journalists could never again do what the Guardian and others did 10 years ago.
"Even now the British government, in hastily revising the laws around official secrecy, is trying to ensure that any editor who behaved as I did 10 years ago would face up to 14 years in prison.
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"The British government believed that, by ordering the destruction of the Guardian computers, they would effectively silence us. In fact, we simply transferred the centre of publications to New York, under the paper’s then US editor, Janine Gibson.
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"The notion that the state has no right to enter a home and seize papers was established in English law in the famous case of Entick v Carrington (1765), which later became the basis for the US fourth amendment. In a famous passage, Lord Camden declared: “By the laws of England, every invasion of private property, be it ever so minute, is a trespass.”
"When I went out to talk about the Snowden case to assorted audiences (including, after a suitable gap, at MI5 itself), I would begin by asking who in the audience would be happy to hand over all their papers to a police officer knocking on their front door, even if they assured them they would only examine them if there was sufficient cause.
"Never, in any of these talks, did a single member of any audience raise a hand. Yes, people valued their security and were open to persuasion that, with due process and proper oversight, there would be occasions when the state and its agencies should be granted intrusive powers in specific circumstances. But the idea of blanket, suspicionless surveillance – give us the entire haystack and we’ll search for the needle if and when it suits us – was repellent to most people."
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