The ‘golf ball’ surveillance dishes at Menwith Hill NSA station in Harrowgate, UK. Many people in the UK are sick of US surveillance. From a Yorkshire CND website detailing the Echelon program.

So in case you haven’t heard this already, Glenn Greenwald (who broke the Edward Snowden case through The Guardian) reported that his partner David Miranda was detained for nine hours in the UK under Britain’s Terrorism Act. Miranda was in flight from Berlin back to his home in Brazil and not even staying in Britain–and according to Greenwald, he was not questioned about terrorism, but about the Snowden case. The police in the UK confiscated his phone, his DVD’s, his laptop, and a thumb-drive or two. This AM, Greenwald updated the story to tell that Brazilian authorities intervened to keep Miranda from being arrested.

I’m going out on a limb and betting that the parliamentarians who helped pass Britain’s Terrorism Act did not intend it to be used against journalists and film-makers and life-partners of journalists. The current PM David Cameron and his pals may be okay with Britain being the enforcer for the US, but many Britons are not–they’re already disgusted with the political leadership that dragged them into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the NSA revelations prove that the suspicions they had about the US spy station at Menwith Hill are completely justified. And even the British public is becoming less enthusiastic about supporting the US positions in things like the drone strike program.

Not coincidentally, last week also saw another event (lost in all the reporting over Egypt, including the fact that the US is continuing aid to the country even after their forces killed over 800 demonstrators). The story is that last week, a group of demonstrators closed down a USAF/German airbase for 24 hours, and the police did not arrest a single protester. Greenwald (and Snowden, and Bradley Manning) all have lots of supporters on the other side of the Atlantic, and Obama and friends better not assume the locals are on ‘our’ side.

And now Greenwald is vowing pay-back for the detention of Miranda. He will not back down. Meanwhile (probably not connected), Wikileaks has uploaded an encrypted 400 gigabyte file to Facebook that contains ‘insurance’. The threat is that the information will be decrypted should harm fall to Julian Assange or other key figures in Wikileaks.

Interesting times we live in.