This morning our friends in Great Britain awoke to this frightening headline in the UK Daily Mail, "European police to spy on Britons: Now ministers hand over Big Brother powers to foreign officers." The European Union which has been so wildly successful in economic matters is implementing two new law enforcement policies which will further weaken the sacred and time honored protections of national sovereignty.

The new powers are known as the European Investigation Order (EIO), which is intended as a partner to the highly controversial European Arrest Warrant (EAW).

One of the major concerns about the EAW, to which Britain is signed up, is that it has been used to investigate the most minor misdemeanors, such as "theft of a dessert" in a Polish restaurant.

Now member states want to make it easier to gather evidence on another's soil. The proposal requires an ‘opt in', which means Britain could sit back and play no part in the new regime.

[...]

...the powers in the directive are available to prosecutors only. Britons under suspicion will not have any right to demand information from overseas police which could prove their innocence.

First, Obama has granted Interpol the ability to operate within the territorial limits of the United States without being subject to the same constitutional restraints that apply to all domestic law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. Second, Obama has exempted Interpol's domestic facilities-including its office within the U.S. Department of Justrice-from search and seizure by U.S. authorities and from disclosure of archived documents in response to Freedom of Information Act requests files by U.S. citizens.