2.10pm BST

Alan Rusbridger has now been interviewed on BBC News and on the World at One about the David Miranda affair. Here are the main points.

• Rusbridger confirmed that David Miranda is taking legal action over his detention at Heathrow. In particular, Miranda wants the material that was taken from him returned. (Earlier suggestions that it was the Guardian itself taking legal action were wrong, although the Guardian is backing what Miranda is doing. The official line from Guardian HQ says: "David Miranda has filed a legal claim with regard to his detention at Heathrow Airport on Sunday 18 August under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. The Guardian is supportive of that claim." Rusbridger said it was not clear that Miranda was committing any offence taking the material through Heathrow.

If the British state, in whatever form - we are not quite sure which bit of the British state we are dealing with - wants to get that material, then I think they have to do it through a more satisfactory procedure than this bizarre bit of the Terror Act that relates solely to ports and transit lounges of airports.

• Rusbridger criticised schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, the law that allowed Miranda to be held for up to nine hours at Heathrow without the usual legal safeguards.

What you instead have is a kind of vacuum that is not quite Britain, not quite not Britain, in which this Act enables people to interrogate people for up to nine hours and seize all their belongings with no checks and balances. That does not seem a very good way to treat people who are engaged in journalism. There has been a worldwide outcry at the fact that Britain was behaving in that way ... If they were to arrest David Miranda in the Heathrow car park, they would have to use bits of the law that have checks and balances that are there to protect journalistic material, amongst other things. But by doing it in a transit lounge they are operating in a kind of stateless way where they can interrogate somebody for nine hours, seize whatever they want, under rules that are about terrorism. And once you start conflating terrorism and journalism as a country, I think you are in some trouble.

• Rusbridger suggested the case could stop other journalists visiting Britain.

A lot of journalists the world over fly through Heathrow. And I think some of them are now going to be quite anxious about how the British authorities regard this bit of Britain that is not quite Britain but is Britain.

• He said that Miranda had "journalistic material" with him when he was detained. But he said that, even under the Official Secrets Act, the police would not have been allowed to arrest Miranda because of what he was carrying. He also said that there was no evidence to suggest that a terrorist group could have got hold of the material Miranda had. (This was the argument used by the Home Office to justify Miranda's detention - see 12pm.)

• He said that Number 10 was involved in the attempt by Whitehall to get the Guardian to return or destroy the material it obtained from Edward Snowden. (Rusbridger wrote about this in today's Guardian.)

• He said he was willing to destroy a copy of the Snowden material at the Guardian's office in London because other copies were available abroad.

It was quite explicit. We had to destroy it or give it back to them. What they wanted for us to give it back to them. I explained that there were other copies, not within the UK, and I did not really see the point of destroying one copy. But because we had other copies I was happy to destroy a copy in London.

Officials threatened legal action if the Guardian did not destroy the material. Rusbridger said he could have resisted in the courts, but that this could have taken up to a year and that during this time the Guardian would not have been allowed to write about this material. Instead, he decided to transfer the reporting to America, he said.

• He said Britain needed to have a proper debate about state surveillance. This is happening in the US and in Europe, but the issues have not been properly debated in the UK, he said.

• He said the Guardian had held back "a great deal" of the secret material obtained from Edward Snowden.

When we met with Whitehall officials, they emphasised that they thought we had behaved responsibly in treating this material.

• He dismissed suggestions that the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald would take revenge on the UK for the detention of his partner, David Miranda, by exposing more secrets about British spies. Although Greenwald made a comment about being "more aggressive, not less" in his reporting, Rusbridger said:

I would not take that too literally ... I don't think there's going to be a change in what we do. But nor are we going to stop what we have been doing.

• He said it was mistake for Edward Snowden to flee to Russia.

I don't know what his options were. I think presentationally it would have been better not to be in Russia, and I'm sure he thinks that too.