Lessons from the new century: What government must not have the power to do

It will be my endeavor to keep this brief and focused, because my main purpose is to introduce a way of thinking that is antithetical to what many people now assume government must be and do.  This is necessary because those assumptions fatally hinder us in all our attempts to throw off the juggernaut of the administrative state.

The central reason for proposing this way of thinking is to construct a framework for a new constitutional convention.  I have zero interest in using anyone’s current buzzwords or specific definitions for this process: I mean by it that a convention like the one that began in 1787 occurs again, and modifications are made to the existing U.S. Constitution.  The purpose of such modifications would be to impose restraints on government that have been gutted since 1789, or whose necessity was not foreseen when the Constitution was first written.

I don’t have specifically-crafted amendments to propose.  That would be putting the cart before the horse.

Advertisement

TOC Ready Room 7 Jan 2023: Border disorder, Project Censorship, Church redux

Back from a Christmas “break,” and I’m still tired of politics.  What a silly method of dealing with human affairs.

A few random updates for the TOC squadron.

Readers probably won’t be surprised to learn that in December, the House Democrats adopted a rule that the J6 Committee materials they were going to send to the National Archives must be sequestered from release for 30 years.

Sourced from Yahoo report below.
Yahoo refs LAT rpt (scroll down) that house Dems rule of Dec 2022 wd prevent Archives release of most J6 docs for 30 yrs (extra-sensitive up to 50).
Democracy so important it requires hiding J6 matl for decades?https://t.co/N96MACCRC9 https://t.co/TvSXEXA311

— J.E. Dyer ☘️ (@OptimisticCon) January 6, 2023

It’s now being reported,

The IT role in Russiagate: Part I – Taking (brief) stock with graphics

[Links to Parts II and III at the bottom. – J.E.]

This article started out to be a somewhat different one, developing a couple of points about the monitoring of EOP (Executive Office of the President) communications referenced in the John Durham court filings.

But with a firehose of new information coming in, it seems necessary to take stock and put in perspective the things we know up to this point.  I don’t think most will find it a waste of time.  The stock-taking is relatively short, and the principal feature is something we haven’t had yet:  schematic diagrams of how the major IT pieces fit together to make the surveillance of “Trump” possible, and facilitate the concoction of an anti-Trump narrative about supposed links to Russia.

The graphics are very simplified, which I suspect many readers will consider a blessing.  My hope is to spare some unnecessary efforts to sort out confusion when it need not be at work.

And there it is: Important distinction regarding the surveillance at issue in the Sussmann case

UPDATE as this goes to post.

There was no guarantee we’d get lucky and see a specific instance of the “surveillance melding” referred to below in the original article – a theme I have discussed at length since 2017.  (What I call “surveillance melding” here is about someone in a position to monitor data streams from multiple intelligence sources using them in company, to spy on and develop specific targets individually and in depth.)

But we did get lucky, due to the sharp eyes of some of our excellent Internet sleuths.  In this case, Margot Cleveland pulled this nugget from a new tranche of emails among the team assembled by Rodney Joffe in 2016 for the DNS lookups caper:

Man, the state, and surveillance

We’ve now had federal judges come down two different ways on the question of NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens.  In the most recent rulings, Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said on 16 December that most of NSA’s surveillance program violates the Fourth Amendment; William H. Pauley III of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled on Friday that the bulk of NSA’s program is lawful.