A British lower court has ruled that London police acted lawfully in employing an anti-terror statute to detain and interrogate David Miranda for nearly nine hours at Heathrow Airport last summer,Â even while recognizing that the detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom.”

Miranda, a Brazilian national, was carrying secret documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden from one reporter to another - from Laura Poitras in Berlin to Miranda’s partner, Glenn Greenwald, in Rio de Janeiro.

Greenwald and Poitras have published extensive revelations from the documents that Snowden provided them, primarily at theÂ GuardianÂ and theÂ New York Times;Â both are now editors atÂ The Intercept. Greenwald was working forÂ Guardian USÂ at the time.

InÂ a decisionÂ released Wednesday morning Lord Justice John Laws, Mr Justice Duncan Ouseley and Mr Justice Peter Openshaw said that while Miranda’s detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom” it was justified and legitimate due to “very pressing” issues of national security.

The review of Miranda’s detention was widely seen as a test of how far governments that have adopted aggressive anti-terror policies will go - and will be allowed to go - in terms of treating journalists who expose those secrets as criminals and terrorists themselves.

And yet, the ruling was not entirely surprising; the UK has historically been an outlier when it comes to both press freedoms and anti-terror policies.

Miranda said his suit will continue. “I will appeal this ruling, and keep appealing until the end, not because I care about what the British government calls me, but because the values of press freedom that are at stake are too important to do anything but fight until the end,” he said in a statement to The Intercept.