Scotland Yard ex-chief for laws to protect state secrets

Anti-terror laws should be strengthened to prevent leaks of official secrets by members of the public, Lord Blair of Boughton, the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) commissioner from 2005 to 2008, said on Sunday.

The peer said there was material the state had to keep secret, but current secrecy laws could only gag civil servants and not the general public.

He was speaking after police seized what they said were thousands of classified documents from David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian journalist who interacted with Edward Snowden to expose Prism, the massive global surveillance programme of the US authorities, particularly the National Security Agency (NSA).

Lord Blair said publication of such material could put lives at risk, and suggested that new laws were needed to cover those who obtained secret material without proper authority.

Miranda is the partner of Glenn Greenwald, who has been reporting on US and British surveillance programmes revealed by US whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

The UK Home Office has defended the use of anti-terror laws to detain Miranda at Heathrow airport and question him for nine hours last week. He was then released without charges, but all his electronic equipment, including a gaming console, were seized.

The incident drew widespread criticism from the UK media.

Brazilian national Miranda, 28, was detained under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 – which can only be applied at UK airports - as he was travelling from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, where he lives with Greenwald.

The law allows police to hold someone for up to nine hours for questioning about whether they have been involved with acts of terrorism, but people are rarely held for the full period and generally released inside two hours.

Lord Blair told BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House programme, "The state has to have secrets - that's how it operates against terrorists.

"It has to have the right to preserve those secrets and we have to have a law that covers a situation when somebody, for all sorts of wonderfully principled reasons, wishes to disclose those secrets.

"It just is something that is extremely dangerous for individual citizens to (make) those secrets available to the terrorists."

Lord Blair said the threat from international terrorism was "constantly changing" and there was a need to "review the law".

Sir Geoffrey Bindman, a human rights solicitor whose firm is representing Miranda, countered, "We are in a situation in this country where the rule of law is steadily being eroded by a number of different measures that have to be looked at together."

He cited legal aid cuts as an example of factors which make it harder for individuals to challenge authorities.

"If you present the picture of serious terror threats - which undoubtedly exist - then that can be used wrongly to justify abuses, to justify over-doing the erosion of individual rights."

David Miranda told the BBC he felt very threatened during his detention.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said, "The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it."