New Durham filing in Sussmann case hits paydirt at home plate (although not the way you may think)

The intent of this update is not to be an in-depth treatment with new research, but to address basic questions flying around social media, with the hope of sparing analysts time in their research efforts.  That said, it turns out, based on the implications of the new court filing, that a lot of my old analysis has been borne out.  There will be plenty of links to that.  The original analysis, which has held up, provides background for verifying the explanations outlined below.

The topic is the latest filing by John Durham in the Michael Sussmann case.  The purpose of the filing is to advise the federal court of a potential conflict of interest for Sussmann’s legal counsel at the firm Latham & Watkins LLP.

Advertisement

Liberty 101: Why the light bulb ban is evil

Keep windows closed. Sweep up. Dispose. Repeat, until incandescent bulbs are gone. Then begin multi-step HAZMAT process for disposing of other bulbs. (Image courtesy of deviantart.com)

The light bulb ban is evil because it treats people as if we are, in the aggregate, a “system” to be tinkered with.  Change an input here, and the output will change there.

Humanity and our aggregate actions and decisions, our interactions with each other and the physical world, the physical world’s effects on us – the sum total of these things is seen, in the progressive-left philosophy, as a great “system,”

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.

The curious case of the al Qaeda threat warning

One thing struck me immediately about the recent al Qaeda threat warning, when U.S. officials claimed that the Hoover-like NSA surveillance program was what enabled us to detect the threat.  Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was emphatic in making this claim:

Those [NSA] programs “allow us to have the ability to gather this chatter,” Chambliss said. “If we did not have these programs then we simply wouldn’t be able to listen in on the bad guys.”

What struck me was that this simply isn’t true – at least, not in terms of the comprehensive implication Chambliss seems to suggest.