Americans with insomnia and a Twitter account may have seen a disturbing sight on Tuesday night. Half a world away, the Australian Federal Police, the country’s equivalent of the FBI, raided the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the country’s equivalent of the BBC. John Lyons, the executive editor of ABC, published a blow-by-blow account on Twitter as AFP agents executed a search warrant against the media organization.

Thousands of internal ABC emails being gone through by the AFP. pic.twitter.com/kgKX7AAbOA — John Lyons (@TheLyonsDen) June 5, 2019

At issue, according to the ABC, was a story published by the outlet in 2017 that detailed episodes in which Australian special forces in Afghanistan killed unarmed people and children. The story came in part from a leak of hundreds of secret military files. Australian law grants law-enforcement agencies broad authority to prosecute whistleblowers, and the police combed through thousands of files during their search of ABC’s emails, drafts, raw footage, and other sensitive files.



It’s not unusual for journalists to face such treatment in more authoritarian countries, which makes it especially disturbing to see them subjected to it in a free nation like Australia. It shows that even liberal-democratic governments will use their power to suppress legitimate journalism, a lesson that America is learning in more subtle ways.

The ABC raid wasn’t an isolated incident. One day earlier, Australian police raided the home of News Corp Australia editor Annika Smethurst as part of a leak investigation. In an article published in the Sydney-based Daily Telegraph last year, Smethurst had reported that Australian ministers were crafting proposals to give an Australian spy agency sweeping new powers to surveil Australian citizens. Police spent hours at Smethurst’s home while searching her computer and cell phone. They had the support of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose center-right Liberal Party won an upset election victory last month. “It never troubles me that our laws are being upheld,” he told reporters.

It troubles Sarah Repucci, who studies democracy and human rights at Freedom House. “I think that any raid on a journalist’s office is an attack on the ability of the journalist to get independent information out to the population,” she said. She framed the raids in the context of a broader global rollback on press freedom, one that’s gathered strength with the proliferation of right-wing populism in recent years, as Freedom House detailed in a report published on Wednesday (with the ominous title, “A Downward Spiral”).