Australian Federal Police (AFP) spent seven hours ransacking a News Corp political reporter’s home in Canberra, and eight hours poring over and seizing files at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Sydney headquarters.

In an extraordinary admission, the AFP’s acting commissioner Neil Gaughan blurted out that the real reason for the raids was to protect the information that the Australian police and intelligence agencies receive from their “Five Eyes” counterparts. Five Eyes is a top-level network of intelligence agencies dominated by the US that also includes Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.