I don’t want to place myself in a pro-snooping camp but I do want to discuss the controversy over David Miranda’s detention at Heathrow Airport in a balanced way. As I’ve said from the beginning, detaining Mr. Miranda under an anti-terrorism statute was ridiculous. The idea, I guess, is that some of the information that Mr. Miranda was carrying could be helpful to terrorists if divulged to the general public, but Bob Cesca comes closer to the true motivation for the detention with this observation:

U.K. authorities can’t possibly believe that by seizing the documents from Miranda that they’re somehow obstructing the ability of The Guardian and Greenwald to write about the content of the documents. Clearly, they’re simply attempting to ascertain which specific stolen documents were attained by Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras from Snowden.

While still maintaining that the terrorism statute was an inappropriate mechanism, it seems to me that it is a legitimate national security activity to do a thorough damage assessment by ascertaining exactly what documents have been leaked. In taking the documents out of the hands of journalists, who have a legal and conventional right to possess leaked documents, and putting them in the hands of a private contract courier, Greenwald and Poitras gave the UK authorities an opening to peruse the potential damage. And that’s really what happened here. It wasn’t an effort to intimidate; it was an intelligence collection operation. It was also, from Greenwald’s end, a blown smuggling operation. It didn’t have to be that way. The Guardian could have sent an actual journalist to carry the documents, but they chose Greenwald’s husband instead. That was a mistake.

I’ll leave it to the British people to argue about the legal rationale that was used. That’s their problem. But Greenwald and The Guardian have mischaracterized the whole episode from the beginning, starting with the fact that Mr. Miranda was offered legal counsel and initially refused it, and that he eventually did get legal representation despite his initial refusal. I remain skeptical of British claims that the documents that Mr. Miranda was smuggling could put lives at risk, but how would they know unless they looked at them?

I understand that some people are just reflexively opposed to the national security state. But we ought to balance that skepticism with some acknowledgment that we need to have a secure classification system. But, most importantly, if you are going to go up against the international intelligence community, you better dot your i’s and cross your t’s, and not spew a bunch of overheated hype that makes it easy to not only discredit you but to discredit the principles you are fighting for.