Reply #14: Has it really?! The Protect America ACT could *still* come back. [View All]

[mojowork_n]

Like those late night TV ads for kitchen gadgets (but wait, there's more!), or the broomsticks multiplying in the Sorcerer's Apprentice, or the hordes of undead, brain-munching zombies in a formula horror flick,
there could be some twitchy, spastic life, left in the Patriot Act.

More than the Republicans want you to know.

(The better to get in their completely gratuitous rips at the "trial lawyer's lobby," and hit us with that "cynical, self-serving opportunism" frame.)

The Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General have the right to extend the act for up to one year.

It was all explained here, at dKos:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/14/161731/200/776/456884

"...Section 2 authorizes the DNI and AG to issue orders authorizing the surveillance authorized by the PAA for periods of up to a year, notwithstanding the sunset. That puts the onus on the DNI and AG to authorize surveillance before Saturday, and not on the Congress to renew it before then."

But I would add, that to really take advantage of the perceived lapsing of FISA, the DNI and AG could have authorized extending surveillance... last week... without telling anybody.

What better way to fool the terrorists, lull them into a false sense of security (along with their lobbying wing, the Democratic Party), and truly Protect America?

We're going to have to pry those microphones, and data mining filters, out of their cold, dead hands.

Or that's what they'd tell us, if they wouldn't have to kill us, first. (If they did.)


Edit Addendum:
Or, they'll just take their own sweet time, to let everyone know the Act's been extended. Is there a law that says they can't? That's the way those guys think, along the lines of gangsters, Trotskyites, or cultists. ("You're with us, or you're against us." No shades of gray, or subtler tints of color, between the darkness and the light.)