There's something super strange about how this article is written. There's a very heavy emphasis on how the government invaded this poor fireman's privacy and endangered the adoption process of two young children. The fireman is emotional, and feels victimized by the police and is even sueing the mayor, the main argument of the article seems to be that the police has too much information about people.

But when you extract just the factual statements from the article there's a whole different picture. The police was investigating a pretty serious crime. One of their tools in this investigation was checking medical records of employees of the fire department to find irregularities that might point to someone with motive to steal opiates. Instead of finding a direct motive they found out a person was committing fraud with prescription drugs. The person was charged, but eventually the charges were dropped because they couldn't round out the evidence, the reason is unclear.

Did this person really commit prescription drug fraud? Did he make money off that? Is that the sort of crime that should throw a wrench in an adoption process?

I obviously don't know the guy, but it seems a bit weird to me to just disregard the idea that the authorities have hard evidence of him circumventing a law. Using the properties of that guy that make him seem like a stand-up guy just to make a larger point about privacy feels a bit disingenuous.