-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)

The rapid spread of public surveillance cameras represents something far more consequential than a new piece of police technology. It represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the individual and the state.

​These cameras allow government agents to record, identify, catalog and retroactively track the movements of people who have committed no crime, are suspected of no wrongdoing and have done nothing to invite government scrutiny. That’s not public safety. It’s an assault upon individual privacy.

​Privacy is not a privilege granted by government. It is an aspect of personal liberty that government exists to protect. It is a natural human right protected from the government in the Bill of Rights. The fact that a person leaves his home and travels upon a public road does not mean that he has surrendered that right.

​There is an enormous moral and constitutional difference between a police officer who happens to observe a person in public and government surveillance that automatically and systematically records that person’s vehicle, location and movements; and stores that information for future use.

​A free society doesn’t just protect people from crime; it protects them from arbitrary government. The presumption is liberty. Government is the negation of liberty. A person should not have to establish his innocence before the government leaves him alone. The burden always belongs to the government to justify all intrusions into personal liberty. Police cameras reverse that principle. They collect information about everyone the camera views and leave it to individuals to challenge the collections afterward.

​The Constitution requires articulable suspicion connecting the person being surveilled to a legitimate law-enforcement objective to justify public surveillance. A vague assertion that the technology might someday help solve a crime or enhance public safety does not meet that standard.

​The view that personal privacy and public safety are in equipoise -- that they are merely two competing interests of equal moral and legal weight from which government officials are entitled to choose subjectively their preferred balance -- is the core of authoritarianism.

​Safety is one of the legitimate purposes for which government exists. Privacy is among the personal liberties that government exists to protect. It cannot be taken away without judicial approval. Government cannot justify violating a natural right merely by asserting that doing so might make people safer. If that were so, there would be no meaningful boundary on any governmental power.

​There is a profound difference between investigating a specific crime through constitutionally authorized surveillance and constructing a permanent infrastructure of suspicionless surveillance. The former begins with evidence and seeks information relevant to a particular governmental purpose. The latter begins with everyone and waits for the evidence.

​When 7,000 American police departments have these systems with no legislative approvals, we have the police making policy judgments. They are deciding that the government should possess a new capacity to observe innocent people, what information should be collected, how long it should be retained, who should have access to it and what purposes may justify searches; all this irrespective of the Constitution.

​Those are not merely administrative questions. They are questions about personal liberty.

​If elected legislators believe that such surveillance is necessary, they should publicly debate it, enact specific legislation mandating warrants, establish meaningful limitations and accept responsibility before the voters. The decision should not be buried in a police procurement process or treated as an ordinary equipment purchase.

​Liberty cannot depend upon the benevolence, restraint or good intentions of government employees. The premise of the Constitution is that government power must be limited, checked and divided because government officials are human beings who possess power and will inevitably have incentives to abuse it.

​The answer is not better government surveillance. The answer is what the Fourth Amendment requires: No government surveillance without search warrants.

​The constitutional question cannot be reduced to whether someone was physically standing in a public place. A police officer seeing a car pass by is one thing. A government database capable of reconstructing months of a person’s movements is something fundamentally different.

​The difference is the difference between observation and surveillance.

​A free people should be profoundly suspicious of any governmental system that makes surveillance the default position. No person should have to fear that every trip down the street is being permanently recorded, whether his movements can later be reconstructed or whether a government official can search his history without individualized suspicion.

​The Constitution mandates that government leave people alone unless it has a legitimate, articulable reason to interfere with their liberty. That principle is not an obstacle to public safety. It is one of the defining characteristics of a free society.

​Police cameras embody the opposite philosophy: Collect first, investigate later; monitor everyone, suspect someone later; expand governmental capacity and trust officials to exercise restraint afterward. That’s not the philosophy of a constitutional republic. It’s the philosophy of a surveillance state.

​The constitutional objection is not that fighting crime is unimportant. It is that government must fight crime chained down by the Constitution, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson. Safety cannot become the magic word that dissolves every constitutional limitation. Privacy cannot be treated as a luxury available only when government determines that it is convenient. And police departments cannot be permitted to acquire, deploy and normalize technologies that fundamentally alter the balance of power between individuals and the state.

​If the police could track all movements, stop anyone on a whim, search and photo as they pleased, would we have less crime? Perhaps. But who would protect us from the criminals in uniform? And who would want to live in such an authoritarian state?

When a government agency comes to an internet service provider demanding information about Americans because of what they have said on social media, the provider should discard the demand, close the door or hang up the phone.

​The government is not entitled to rummage through the political opinions, associations, criticisms and angry rhetoric of anyone merely because a government official finds those opinions offensive, threatening to an agency’s reputation or inconvenient to its mission.

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Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is not qualified to be the attorney general of the United States because he has demonstrated a hopeless conflict between the rule of law -- which he has taken an oath to support -- and his sense of personal loyalty to President Donald Trump, whom he represented for several years in a notorious but frivolous criminal case in New York.

​What to do about a nominee as chief law enforcement officer in the land who has and will not disavow this conflict? Reject him.

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This week, President Donald Trump announced that he plans to give away tax dollars without congressional or judicial authorization to his friends and allies whom he believes were mistreated by the Biden administration. Can he legally do that?

​Here is the backstory.

​During the last year of his first term in office, Trump’s tax returns were stolen along with those of 425,000 others by an IRS employee who leaked Trump’s to media outlets. The acts of stealing and leaking were, of course, criminal, and the now-former IRS employee who pleaded guilty to theft of government documents served nearly four years in federal prison.

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​“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished

​unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

​-- Voltaire (1694-1778)

Last week, when the Pentagon resumed its attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, the media barely noticed. The U.S. military has now destroyed 56 vessels and killed 190 persons. The killings began in September 2025 and have continued to this month.

​The attacks caused a stir a few months ago when one of the strikes disabled the boat at which the attack was aimed but failed to kill all the passengers. When a follow-up strike was ordered, it succeeded where the initial strike had failed. The admiral who ordered the murder of the survivors told members of Congress in secret that he believed he was following orders. The secretary of defense denied that he ordered the survivors to be killed.

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The Fourth Amendment protects all persons from warrantless government searches and seizures of their persons, houses, papers and effects. It requires that warrants be supported by probable cause of crime and specifically describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

​Last week, for the first time in the modern era, the government argued to the Supreme Court of the United States that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution did not outlaw general warrants. General warrants were issued in the colonial era by a secret court in London. They were not based on probable cause of crime or even on articulable suspicion about a potential defendant. They did not identify a target or state what crime was being investigated.

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Is personal freedom a reality or a myth? Does the government execute the will of the governed or the will of those who finance its officials? Does the Bill of Rights restrain the government? Are the levers of government power pulled by those the governed have elected or those we don’t see? Do elections change anything?

​Can the president kill people whom he suspects might commit a crime? Aren’t even those who would cause great harm entitled to due process? Isn’t everyone entitled to a fair trial in front of a neutral judge and jury before any punishment can be administered?

​Aren’t all persons legally innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty? Isn’t this presumption of innocence the linchpin of American jurisprudence? At trial and before punishment, isn’t it the government’s obligation to prove every element of the crimes charged? Isn’t there no such thing in American jurisprudence as a presumption of guilt?

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During the first Trump administration, the FBI quietly spent $5 million on Pegasus, an Israeli-developed software product known generically as zero click. Zero click permits the user to download the contents of another mobile or desktop device without tricking the user of that device into clicking on a viral link.

​When FBI Director Christopher Wray was confronted with evidence of this purchase in 2021, he stated under oath at a congressional hearing that his agents did not and would not use it; but they bought it because they wanted to understand how it worked. He claimed that it was in storage under lock and key in a warehouse in New Jersey.

​Not trusting his own FBI director, President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2023 prohibiting the use of this software by any employee of the federal government except for true national security emergencies. Last week, we learned that President Donald Trump quietly rescinded Biden’s executive order.

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✅Power should feel pressure.
✅War claims should be interrogated.
✅Intelligence leaks should be scrutinized.
✅Spending should be tracked.
✅Casualties should be counted.
🚨That’s the job.

If the press won’t hold government accountable regardless of party, then it isn’t protecting democracy — it’s protecting power.

And Madison’s warning becomes less theoretical by the day.

The X Post below. Follow Chris on X @ChrisLeonardATL

When President Donald Trump first announced that he had ordered the Pentagon to attack fishing boats and speedboats on the high seas which he said carried dangerous drugs destined for willing buyers in the United States, many of us who monitor the government for its indifference to the Constitution perceived it as truly criminal and utterly scandalous.

​The military commits murder when it intentionally kills a civilian non-combatant who poses no immediate threat to the U.S. or to military personnel. The crime is committed by all personnel in the chain of command who knowingly participate in these attacks.

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We’ve got a wave in the air

Radar love

Golden Earring, Radar Love

by: Pepe Escobar

HONG KONG - Persia and China go back a long – historical – way. Focus for a moment just on the 7^th century, in peak Silk Road times, when the two great poles of development were Sassanian Persian and Tang China, always on good mutual terms, and sharing a key common interest in Eurasia trade.

Now jump to the 21^st century, when China is the great trading/geoeconomic power on the planet, and Iran is one of the very few sovereigns left.

This week marks the 47th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution – followed with great interest by Chinese intellectuals since the early years of Deng Xiaoping in power, when the new Iran theo-democracy proclaimed its foreign policy of “Neither East nor West”.

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Legal scholars have many lenses through which to examine the Constitution. Lawyers need to master about 150 Supreme Court decisions in order to have a sufficient understanding of the government. But most of what lawyers have studied is theory -- how the Constitution is supposed to work, as opposed to how it actually does work. This “supposed to” versus “actually does” conundrum is often called the formal versus the functional.

​Formally, the United States still has a Constitution. We still have the three branches of government. Congress still has the House of Representatives and the Senate. The president is still elected by the Electoral College. The courts still function to resolve disputes and to define what the laws mean and what the Constitution means.

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The United States invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, the domestically recognized Venezuelan president, violated the U.S. Constitution and international law.

​The Constitution makes clear that only Congress can authorize a foreign invasion. In the pre-World War II era, Congress declared war on countries that attacked the U.S. or were allied with those that did, and those declarations expired upon the surrender by legal authorities in the targeted countries.

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We all know that God works in mysterious ways.

​Recently, I was deeply moved at a theatrical production of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” This is the famous and popular tale of the transformation and redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge from a rasping, grasping old miser into a lovable, generous old man who, late in life, becomes determined to make amends for all his extreme selfishness and his public denunciations of charity.

​After tossing and turning in bed on Christmas Eve night, during which he has dreams showing self-imposed loneliness in his youth and present-day suffering he could easily alleviate, and future rejoicing and mockery at his death, he awakes on Christmas morning a new man.

​He immediately parts with some of his wealth to the very people and institutions he formerly rejected; he makes amends with relatives he had ignored; and his heart swells with joy -- a joy he had never known.

​It was a joy his riches had never brought him.

​In the production I saw, Scrooge gave numerous soliloquies in which he bared his soul, at first condemning the poor for being useless (“Are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?”) and then embracing them.

​This is, of course, fiction; yet it is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ that one can -- with a firm purpose of amendment -- turn to God and love Him at any time in one’s life, no matter one’s past.

​In one of his final soliloquies, Scrooge questions whether he has the bravery to become a new man. Of course, he does. And the remainder of his life is changed for the good.

​I have read “A Christmas Carol” a half-dozen times, and I have seen many theatrical and motion picture renditions of it. The last two times I saw this production, I was moved deeply by the bravery comment. As Scrooge approaches the end of his old life with fear and trembling, he embraces his new life with generosity and joy. However, it is not easy, and he must summon much bravery.

​While watching this theatrical transformation, it occurred to me that Our Lord and Savior demonstrated extraordinary bravery when he took on human form. Taking Christmas seriously means believing that Jesus was conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary by an act of the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Blessed Trinity.

​Because Jesus is both the second person of the Blessed Trinity and was born of a woman, he is true God and true man. His nature -- the hypostatic union of divinity and human flesh -- is not only unique in all existence and in all time; it is inseparable.

​Thus, through the miracle of transubstantiation, which Christ performs at every Mass through the instrumentality of a Catholic priest, He is physically present. Taking Christmas seriously means that the Holy Eucharist is not a representation of Jesus Christ; it IS Jesus Christ. It is His body, blood, soul and divinity -- crucified and resurrected.

​All of this came about because God the Father -- the first person of the Blessed Trinity -- chose a young Jewish girl in Palestine to be the mother of His son 2,000 years ago, and the girl -- the Blessed Virgin Mary -- said yes.

​Dickens does not get into the theology of Christ’s birth, but he emphasizes the value of charity to human happiness and eternal salvation. The word “charity” comes from the Latin “caritas,” which means love. Because charity is lovingly giving from your own loving heart, it is impossible to be charitable with someone else’s assets because that is not giving from the giver’s heart.

​When the government claims it is being charitable with your money, it is looking for political support from those who have received what it has taken from you. That’s not charity. Charity is freely given, not governmentally taken.

​Of course, the greatest charity is laying down one’s life for one’s friends. Taking Christmas seriously means recognizing not only Jesus’ virgin birth, not only His hypostatic union, not only His love of humanity, but also His crucifixion and resurrection.

​Now back to bravery.

​Jesus, who is God, spent the nine months preceding his birth as a baby in Mary’s womb. Those who believe that the baby in the mother’s womb is not a person do not take Christmas seriously. What do they think Jesus was in Mary’s womb -- the second person of the Blessed Trinity, true God and true man or just a hunk of flesh? He was God in the womb -- human and divine -- and thus very much a person.

​Taking Christmas seriously means rejecting abortion in all its forms because it is the killing of an innocent person. Jesus had the bravery to take Mary seriously, that she’d keep Him in her womb until birth and then raise him to adulthood so He could save the world from sin and interior darkness.

​Taking Christmas seriously means recognizing that Jesus is, as the late great spiritual writer Dom Eugene Boylan called him, “This Tremendous Lover,” that He came to call sinners, not the just, that he loves all, forebears all, forgives all and remains with all. Taking Christmas seriously means that by embracing His cross -- by denying oneself and being charitable to others -- we can rise from the dead as He did.

​Taking Christmas seriously means humility, charity and abandonment to His will.

​God does work in mysterious ways and often through strange people. Taking Christmas seriously is the lesson of “A Christmas Carol.” Through Scrooge we see that it is never too late to love God and to show that love through our hearts by loving others.

​And the internal joy that comes from giving overwhelms the fleeting joy that comes from keeping.

​Merry Christmas.

Why? Because of the political, historical and cultural opinions of a guest on Mr. Carlson’s podcast. You read that correctly: The U.S. Senate is being asked to condemn Mr. Carlson because of what someone else said.

Here is the backstory.

When James Madison was crafting the iconic language of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press”), he insisted that the word “the” precede the word “freedom” in the text of the amendment to emphasize the understanding of the drafters and ratifiers that expressive freedoms preexisted the drafting of the amendment. The theory of law offers that the freedom of speech is pre-political and that it is natural. It comes from our humanity.

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What if the government’s true goal is not to protect our rights, but to perpetuate its own power? What if the real levers of governmental power are pulled by agents and diplomats and by bureaucrats and central bankers behind the scenes? What if they stay in power no matter who is elected president or which political party controls either house of Congress?

​What if the president never read the Constitution? What if he thinks it’s a book? What if he doesn’t read books? What if he took his oath of office as just a formality? What if when he took his oath he harbored mental reservations about the constitutional restraints imposed on him? What if he didn’t mean what he said?

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This was a great interview and I wanted to share it with the Substack community just in case you missed it.

The Tariff Test: Supreme Court Weighs Limits of Executive Power

This week the Supreme Court will begin the process of deciding if the president can impose a sales tax on products and services which originate in foreign countries and are purchased in the United States. The president calls these taxes tariffs.

​Tariffs are nearly as old as the republic and when imposed by Congress -- as they have been going back to the presidency of Thomas Jefferson -- are clearly constitutional. Yet the questions before the court ask if Congress delegated away to the president the power to tax, and if it did, was that delegation constitutional?

​The Department of Justice argues that both of those questions should be answered in the affirmative. However, if the court concludes that Congress never gave its taxing powers to the president, then it needn’t reach the second question. It should answer both questions in the negative as there is simply no statute in which Congress has authorized the president to impose tariffs on his own, and under the Constitution, only Congress may impose taxes.

​The DOJ argues that the National Emergencies Act of 1976 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 permit the president to address emergencies, and one of the tools of addressing emergencies is to impose tariffs. Does the United States currently have an economic emergency? The president says that the imbalance of trade -- American industry and consumers buying more from foreigners than American industry sells to them -- is somehow an emergency. It is not. We have had an imbalance of trade since 1934. Moreover, neither of the statutes upon which the president relies for authority to impose tariffs even mentions tariffs by name or implication.

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​The Trump administration has claimed that it can kill whomever it designates as an unlawful enemy combatant -- it prefers the political phrase “narco-terrorist” -- and the due process it provides is the intelligence gathered by American spies and the White House analysis of that intelligence. This secret analysis, the government’s argument goes, satisfies the president that the folks he has ordered killed are engaging in serious and harmful criminal behavior, and somehow is a lawful and constitutional substitute for the jury trial and its attendant procedural protections that the Constitution commands.

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