Fishing Expeditions

For John, BLUF:  Keeping the powers of the police within reasonable limits is important to our democracy.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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This is from the UK, but it is still a good point, and our sense of law and the "Rights of Englishmen" comes to us from that fabled isle.

Never mind Damian Green, do you want the cops to have this power over you?

This post to Samizdata is from Ms Natalie Solent (Essex), 1 December 2017.

Here is the lede plus one:

David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union has threatened to resign if Damian Green (the First Secretary of State, effectively Deputy Prime Minister) is sacked unfairly.  Why, you may ask, is Davis – a Brexiteer – willing to put Theresa May’s already shaky government at risk for the sake of a Remainer like Green?

The Guardian link above explains it better than I can:

The Brexit secretary believes his cabinet colleague is the victim of a police vendetta and made it clear to Theresa May that he would be willing to leave the government if he felt Green had been unfairly treated.

The threat emerged only hours after a former Metropolitan police detective came forward with fresh claims implying that Green himself had been viewing pornography found on his workplace computer when police raided his Commons office in November 2008.

Green was a shadow Home Office minister at the time and was under investigation because he had received a series of sensitive Home Office leaks.  He denies viewing pornography on his parliamentary computer.

At the time, the Conservatives were fighting some of the Labour government’s law and order measures on libertarian grounds and Davis was a strong backer of Green’s work.

Here is the thing.  We have, in our own way, become a very prudish society.  And, subpoenas have become fishing licenses.  It would be better if we limited a subpoena and the results collected from raids under a subpoena to the topic of the subpoena.

And, yes, retired policemen (and others) should not be telling tales out of school.

Regards  —  Cliff