White House Threat to Veto CISPA Is a Crude Stunt

Obama is once again posing as a champion of privacy rights
Paul Joseph Watson

Even as drones are deployed domestically to spy on American citizens, Barack Obama is posing as a champion of privacy and civil liberties by threatening to veto the CISPA web snooping bill, just as his administration pretended to be hostile to the National Defense Authorization Act before signing it anyway.

An email released by the White House this afternoon claims the administration is unhappy with the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act because it fails to include proper “privacy, confidentiality, and civil liberties safeguards.”

“If H.R. 3523 were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill,” states the email.

This is another crude stunt to lull civil libertarians on the left into a false sense of security.

As we documented earlier, Obama pulled precisely the same trick with the NDAA ‘indefinite detention’ bill, when for months he threatened to veto it while his administration secretly lobbied for the most draconian provisions to be added. When push came to shove, Obama signed the bill on New Year’s Eve while everyone’s attention was diverted.

Indeed, the real reason behind the administration’s hostility to CISPA is revealed later in the email – that it doesn’t give the Department of Homeland Security enough power over Internet traffic.

“H.R. 3523 effectively treats domestic cybersecurity as an intelligence activity and thus, significantly departs from longstanding efforts to treat the Internet and cyberspace as civilian spheres. The Administration believes that a civilian agency -- the Department of Homeland Security -- must have a central role in domestic cybersecurity, including for conducting and overseeing the exchange of cybersecurity information with the private sector and with sector-specific Federal agencies,” states the email.

As we reported earlier, this is the subject of an amendment introduced by prolific big government advocate Sheila Jackson Lee that would empower the Department of Homeland Security to intercept online IRS tax returns and any other Internet traffic deemed to transit networks owned by the federal government or operated on its behalf.

The Obama administration’s sudden concern for the privacy of American citizens, even as it simultaneously signs off on a multitude of other fourth amendment-busting policies, including domestic surveillance drones, mandatory black boxes in all vehicles, and empowering the IRS to revoke passports, is nothing more than a head fake to disguise the White House’s dissatisfaction with how the new powers in the bill are dispersed at the federal level.

Once the bill has been amended to give the DHS more power, expect Obama to sign it without delay, whether the snooping provisions have been removed or not.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

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