April 16-17, 2013 -- The Boston Marathon bombing has its own "Patriot Act" lined up

The bombing at the Boston Marathon has provided an impetus for the passage in the House of Representatives of the

controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which has been likened to a "Patriot Act for the

Internet" by the bill's opponents. The bill, which has the strong support of House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike

Rogers (R-MI) and the ranking member, Dutch Ruppersberger (called the congressman from the National Security

Agency), authorizes information technology companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, E-Bay, Amazon,

Microsoft and others to share in real time massive amounts of personal data -- referred to as "cyber-threat" data in the

bill -- with U.S. intelligence agencies.

The Obama White House had been under intense pressure from civil liberties groups and a few Internet companies like

Mozilla to veto CISPA because of the bill's lack of privacy oversight controls. However, Boston may have changed the

entire dynamic, especially is the perpetrator or perpetrators are discovered to have used the Internet to plan the bombing

attack. Initial White House opposition to CISPA appears to be evaporating and the Senate, which was poised to block the

bill, also appears to be having second thoughts.

In the months after 9/11, the Congress passed and President George W Bush quickly signed the USA PATRIOT Act,

which emaciated many constitutional rights enshrined by the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.

No hearings were held on the bill and Congress was too pre-occupied with the anthrax mailings to seriously debate the

bill's draconian provisions. Like CISPA, the provisions of the PATRIOT Act languished in the Department of Justice and

congressional committees before 9/11 hastened its passage. The full House is expected to vote on CISPA this week amid

an increase in security on Capitol Hill in the wake of the Boston bombings.

The aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings has seen a massive attack on "conspiracy" websites by the corporate

media. These attacks on independent media play into the hands of CISPA supporters who argue that the personal details,

including passwords, log-in data, browsing data, and financial information, on activists who use the web to spread their

non-conformist messages should be stored in massive government databases for the ultimate purpose of curtailing their

access to the Internet. Moreover, companies are granted liability protection from aggrieved customers who believe their

privacy has been violated.

Critics of CISPA cite the new massive NSA data warehouse in Bluffdale, Utah as the ultimate repository for data

gathered pursuant to CISPA. NSA insiders have told WMR that the Bluffdale facility, which is the size of two football

fields, cost $2 billion, and can store a yottabyte of data (a million billion gigabytes) is designed to monitor all

transactional data on the Internet, as well as all forms of messaging, including tweets, e-mail, instant messages and text

messages.

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