There are many aspects of the Damian Green affair that are shocking—the breach of Parliamentary privilege, the decision to arrest an opposition MP for essentially doing his job and the role of the permanent secretary at the Home Office—but I think this might be the most disturbing:
The police checked his e-mails for information on Britain’s leading civil liberties group. “They chose key words to search all the e-mails and documents and among the more noteworthy and alarming words they were searching were Shami Chakrabarti, [the director of Liberty]. The police wanted to look at every e-mail over the past few years between an opposition politician and a civil liberties campaigner, although Shami Chakribarti had nothing to do with any of the leaks. This feels to me like a fishing expedition on somebody who embarrasses the government of the day. That is very disturbing.”
The police really do seem to have been totally and utterly out of control in this case.
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