The British government is being accused of abusing press freedom after detaining the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is well known for his series of exposés on U.S. government surveillance based on the leaks of Edward Snowden. On Sunday, Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, was held and interrogated at London’s Heathrow Airport while traveling home to Brazil. Miranda had spent the previous week in Berlin with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has worked with Greenwald in reporting Snowden’s leaks. Miranda was held without an attorney under Section 7 of the British Terrorism Act for nine hours — the maximum time he could be detained without charge. He was finally released after British authorities seized his mobile phone, laptop, camera, DVDs, games consoles, and encrypted thumb drives carrying documents leaked by Edward Snowden. In a statement, Greenwald called his partner’s detention “a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and GCHQ” (the NSA’s British counterpart). Greenwald added: “The last thing it will do is intimidate or deter us in any way from doing our job as journalists. … it will only embolden us to continue to report aggressively.”