Annika Smethurst raid was more than an invasion of privacy
On Tuesday morning, journalist Annika Smethurst opened her front door to find seven AFP officers waiting for her. All because she dared to do her job and keep the nation informed on what its government was doing.
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Seven federal cops. Seven hours. The rubbish bins. The oven. The underwear drawers.
Tuesday’s raid on the home of our national political editor Annika Smethurst was a shocking invasion of privacy — but it was much more sinister than that.
This is an attempt to intimidate journalists, and more importantly their sources, who attempt to reveal information that is in the public interest.
Annika’s story, published in April 2018, was absolutely in the public interest: it revealed secret plans at the highest levels of the Canberra bureaucracy to allow the Australian Signals Directorate to cyber-spy on Australian citizens.
That’s a chilling prospect: this agency was created to keep Australia safe from external, i.e. foreign, threats.
RELATED: Spying shock: Shades of Big Brother as cyber-security vision comes to light
We already have plenty of organisations who investigate Australians suspected of crime — from the AFP to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. The addition of yet another organisation — one that has far-reaching technological capability to hack into every corner of a person’s digital and real life — is absolutely a story Australians had a right to know.
Annika was getting ready for work in Canberra on Tuesday morning when there was a knock at the door. She opened it to find seven AFP officers clutching a warrant granted by an ACT magistrate giving them authority to search her home and her digital devices.
They took her phone, which contains all her most sensitive contacts, emails, photographs and other personal and professional data, and spent the day harvesting it.
They went through every drawer and cupboard from the bedrooms to the living room and, in the kitchen, knelt on the floor rummaging through drawers of whisks and spoons. They looked in the oven. They looked at every page of every cookbook.
Now Annika is left wondering whether she’ll be charged with a breach of the Crimes Act relating to official secrets.
News Corp Australia, which publishes this masthead, has been campaigning for many years for politicians to explicitly protect journalists from laws that infringe upon the freedom of the press. They have failed to do so — and today we see that in fact federal agencies are inclined to do absolutely the opposite.
This raid was about intimidation, pure and simple.
Claire Harvey is deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph
Originally published as Annika Smethurst raid was more than an invasion of privacy
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