There is so much going on with the surveillance story today nothing else is as amygdala-flagging.

Good, but long PDF here.

From a summary page on Free Republic:

Conclusions 1.Historically, incumbent Presidents order espionage (to include eavesdropping) against the candidate of the party that opposes them. 2.This election linked espionage may include illegal eavesdropping from one political party against the other party, or it may involve espionage inside the respective parties. 3.Historically, the NSA has been used for this sort of eavesdropping, but other agencies may be involved as well. 4.It would have been astoundingly unusual for President Obama not to order the eavesdropping of Candidate Trump, or Candidate Sanders. 5.The NSA has a partnership agreement with the intelligence services of four other nations, to include the British GCHQ through the Five Eyes partnership. By performing a “Reach Around” the NSA can provide GCHQ with access to the private communications of a Presidential candidate, so that GCHQ writes up the information contained in the intercept, which GCHQ then leaks through various deniable sources to the media in order to control U.S. elections. 6.President Trump has a legitimate claim that the NSA eavesdropped on him during the Presidential campaign of 2016. 7.President Trump has a legitimate claim that the NSA routed signals out of Trump Tower to GCHQ, who were an integral mechanism to attempt to manipulate the U.S. Elections. 8.President Trump claims that President Obama had his wires tapped are legitimate, credible, and viable. 9.It is highly probable that President Obama did in fact violated the Fourth Amendment and attempted to sabotage the Presidential Campaign of Donald Trump by using the NSA and its various eavesdropping programs.

It raises one interesting question – how often have we watched in frustration as the Republican candidate seemingly bent over backward to not do the things we knew he had to do to win. John McCain’s continual reassurances to the nation of how wonderful Obama was. Mitt Romney’s refusal to attack Obama or support conservative principles. John Boehner’s big disaster of a speakership. Even John Robert’s rewriting of the decision on Obamacare. Every time we begin to get somewhere, a McCain or a Lindsey Graham come out of nowhere and tell the leftist media how bad conservatives are, and how we need to give up on something for principle. All of that would make sense in the context of blackmail courtesy of intelligence gathering.

My own assumption is, that the big difference was that after September 11th the domestic spying apparatus was consolidated under a single national authority under Bush. Local town PDs who ran a few detectives on intermittent surveillance, State PD intelligence units, Federal LE Intel outfits, probably even Coast Guard, Military, and Foreign Intel training operations, as well as the private contractors that all would periodically use, were consolidated, so they all operated together as a single coordinated unit. Whereas previously all those organizations operated separately and did their own thing (and could end up at odds if a local PD uncovered some illegal surveillance in their town by another actor), now they were coordinated, controlled, and combined with a massive civilian informer/asset program.

Previous administrations probably merely tapped wires, and deployed in-person on a select few professional players in the political game, but now the machine is so big that everybody gets some.

Power among men seems to follow a pattern. Threat causes people to bestow power, the power eradicates the threat, and then the power is at some point abused and rescinded, very often to the degree that a threat is allowed to return, which then causes power to be bestowed.

It is a funny thing about man – he always seems to fall into cycles of extremism, rather than just stably balancing himself.

Spread r/K Theory, because something has to travel over your wires