It is typical of authoritarian governments that assail press freedoms to claim they are defending national security, since any effort by the news media to expose official misconduct can be construed as a revelation of state “secrets.” And it is typical of democratic governments to recognize that this role of the press is essential to protect the public from official abuse.

That’s why this week’s raids on journalists by the Australian Federal Police, accompanied by an unconvincing mantra of just-doing-our-job, are so galling. The back-to-back raids, on the home of a journalist and the Sydney offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the country’s public broadcaster, replete with seizure of records and files likely to contain the identities of confidential sources within the government, were straight from the playbook of authoritarian thugs. The justification offered by the police had a familiar, sinister ring: the “alleged p ublishing of information classified as an official secret, which is an extremely serious matter that has the potential to undermine Australia’s national security.”

The secrets the federal police were claiming to protect were in fact serious official misconduct that should have been the primary focus of police investigations. The first raid, on Tuesday, was on the Canberra home of Annika Smethurst, political editor of The Sunday Telegraph of Sydney, who in April 2018 reported a top-secret proposal to allow broader surveillance of Australian citizens, illegal under current law.

Then, on Wednesday, the police went to the public broadcaster’s offices, demanding access to emails, notes and drafts linked to a searing report in 2017 titled “The Afghan Files,” which provided evidence that Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan had killed unarmed civilians. A former defense lawyer who has acknowledged leaking the information and is already under arrest has said he turned the information over to the news media only after the military and the police failed to heed his reports.