The Australian federal police have raided the Canberra home of intelligence officer Cameron Gill.

The Australian Federal Police have not commented on the identity of the person subject to Wednesday’s search, but confirmed they had executed a search warrant at a property in Griffith. Police said it was not in relation to “any current or impending threat to the Australian community” but would not comment further, beyond confirming it was “in relation to a commonwealth official”.

#BREAKING | The AFP are raiding the home of a former senior media advisor within the government. #auspol #AFPRaid pic.twitter.com/zrNpZcCSUC — Sandra Sully (@Sandra_Sully) September 4, 2019

Wednesday’s raid in Canberra follows a series of controversial searches on media outlets, including the ABC head office in Ultimo and the home of News Corp political editor, Annika Smethurst in June.

Property records link a “C Gill” to the home raided by police. Guardian Australia has confirmed separately that Gill was a target of the raid and worked as an intelligence officer. Gill is being represented by Kamy Saeedi, a prominent criminal lawyer in the ACT. Saeedi was present at the property on Wednesday, but declined to comment when contacted by Guardian Australia later in the afternoon.

Cameron Gill was also listed as an adviser to then defence materiel minister, Mal Brough, in defence documents recording a meeting with former US ambassador John Berry in 2015.

It is unclear whether Wednesday’s raid is connected to the Smethurst story, which reported that the heads of the defence and home affairs ministries had discussed draconian new powers to allow the Australian Signals Directorate to spy on Australian citizens for the first time.

The secretary of the home affairs department, Mike Pezzullo, recently told a Senate committee the AFP had a suspect and was “closing in”. The deputy AFP commissioner Neil Gaughan told the same committee there was “significant” concern about where the person who had allegedly provided the material “potentially sits in the bureaucracy”.

As Thursday’s raid was being carried out, Australian Law Council president Arthur Moses, addressing the National Press Club, urged the media to continue questioning the Commonwealth’s growing national security powers, and “not just those that are threats to your freedoms”.

“Enacting laws in the name of national security without testing them can result in overreach and the erosion of basic freedoms,” he said. “Do not be quiet Australians. That is not your job.”

Moses said Australian’s national security laws had developed “inconsistently” since the September 11 attacks “in an environment of increasing powers to intercept and access data”.

“Disclosure of classified information by the media should only be criminalised if it can be proven to have posed real harm to national security,” he said.

“...It must be more than just embarrassment to government or some bureaucrat being humiliated because of a grand plan to acquire more power has been exposed.”

Asked to clarify what he meant by “more than just embarrassment” as a threshold, Moses said the legislation needed narrow definitions of ‘harm’.

“It needs to be narrowly defined within the legislation so that there is a risk to the safety of the public or the Commonwealth in relation to the publication of material,” he said.

“At the moment, it is broadly defined and we saw at the Senate estimates committee, the secretary of the department attempting to defend that particular issue. And what became apparent was an emotive issue in response to it being a Canberra game where one agency was potentially leaking information against another agency. That is not relevant to national security. That is a game between two departments.

“That should never be the trigger for there to be a raid on the home of a journalist in respect of gathering information, certainly trying to find the source of the journalist’s story.

“That is not what the legislation should be designed to do, and that comment was regrettable, but it demonstrates the real issue at play here, and I think, again, we need to be careful about legislation to ensure that we narrowly define these concepts when you are providing broad powers to law enforcement agencies to investigate these matters and then have people prosecuted.”

Scott Morrison was asked about the ABC and Smethurst raids when speaking to Melbourne radio 3AW on Wednesday morning, and repeated his oft-used defence that journalists were not above the law.

“Well I’m sorry. If people break the law in this country they should be same subject to the same laws as everybody else. Politicians and- people can search my home if they want, if they think, if they suspect me of a crime Neil. I don’t place myself above the law, I don’t see why anyone else would,” he said.