imprisonbush.com

The more you take a look at the Protect America Act, the less it makes sense. There is no impending threat of terrorist attack. The Bush White House admits that. Yet, George W. Bush all of a sudden says that he needs huge new spy powers to be legalized, and he needs these spy powers now, not a month from now.

Well, if there is no impending terrorist threat of attack this summer, what are these new spy powers for, and why did he need them within less than a month?

The mystery of the Protect America Act is this: What is happening during the scheduled recess of Congress that George W. Bush needed extraordinary newly legalized spy powers for?

One possible answer: The new law is about a resurrection of Total Information Awareness, a program that was supposed to have been stopped years ago, designed to bring private electronic information from multiple resources, including intercepted Internet traffic, into one gigantic computer database.

Originally, that database was to be housed at DARPA, in an office run by John Poindexter, of Iran Contra infamy. However, when the Total Information Awareness project was discovered, it was moved over to the National Security Agency.

Put one and one together, now. Who has been doing the warrantless “wiretapping” partially exposed within the Bush Administration? The National Security Agency.

The Protect America Act is designed to legalize just the sort of electronic surveillance that was planned by John Poindexter in the form of Total Information Awareness. Furthermore, just such a program has been partially exposed by AT&T employee Mark Klein, who alleges that he personally observed a huge system for diverting electronic information into National Security Agency computers in a communications center in California.

What kind of information was going through that center? Web traffic, email, telephone calls, and a lot of it. Klein explained in an interview with Frontline: “…billions of bits of data going in and out every second every day. So all the Web surfing you’re doing, whatever you’re doing on the Internet — the pictures, the video, the Voice over Internet — all that stuff’s going in and out of there. And then of course there’s also the traditional phone switch, which is doing what it’s been doing since before the Internet.”

This web page you’re reading now is likely routed through that center, or another one like it, possibly with another National Security Agency splitter like the one that Mark Klein saw. Welcome to the NSA.

It just so happens that about two dozen lawsuits are going through the courts trying to force the Bush Administration to reveal the extent to which it is using the National Security Agency to spy on Americans’ Internet use.

Right before George W. Bush started his desperate push to force Congress to pass the Protect America Act, the government’s effort to block one of those cases was denied. That was July 24. There is no mention of a need to revise the FISA regulations on electronic spying against Americans until the day after that.

Search Google News on July 22 or 23rd for FISA. You’ll come up with news about the FISA World Rowing Competition. It’s around noontime on July 25th, the day after the case brought by 5 state governments’ to get information about the NSA supercomputer Internet spy network was advanced a vital step forward in the courts, that we see the start of the push to pass the Protect America Act.

The headline on July 25th from United Press International: Boehner backs bill to beef up FISA. The article refers to the first draft of the Protect America Act, introduced by Heather Wilson… on July 24th, the same day that the court judgment against the Bush Administration came down.

The timing is too coincidental to avoid suspicion. We don’t know what goes on in secrecy. That’s why it’s called secrecy. However, what we can see is enough to judge that there’s a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to the passage of the Protect America Act.