Providing for Consideration of Conference Report on H.R. 2272, America Competes Act

Floor Speech

PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 2272, AMERICA COMPETES ACT -- (House of Representatives - August 02, 2007)

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Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. Mr. Speaker, we now have 2 days left before the August break, and I would ask my colleagues to oppose the previous question on this conference report so that we may immediately address the problems in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

We have now reached a point where the majority is committed to bring legislation to the floor, and that is a very big step forward, and I regret that it has taken so much public pressure to get us to this point. I am actually a believer that intelligence matters are best dealt with quietly, but when quiet encouragement does not work and national security is at stake, we have an obligation to increase the public pressure in order to get a political decision to move and get things done when it is important to this country.

Now that that political decision has been made and the majority has said they will bring legislation to the floor, we need to make sure that that legislation fixes the problem. In other words, we have to get this right. It is critical to get this right. Several Democrat leaders have put forward some ideas, but there are two of them that don't make any sense to me.

They want, first, only temporary authority to listen to foreigners in foreign countries. And, second, they want to still be in a situation where you have to get a court order to approve eavesdropping on foreigners in foreign countries.

Let's look at that for a second. My colleagues want two things. They want only temporary authority to listen to foreigners in foreign countries. The war on terrorism is not a temporary thing, and spying is not new. As early as the invention of the telegraph and reading people's mail during World War I that was going back and forth to Europe, in World War II much of the war was won because we broke codes that the Germans and Japanese were using and listened to their communications. During the Cold War we listened to our enemies. We have a foreign intelligence apparatus, and we spy on our enemies. Foreign intelligence collection is not new, and it is not temporary. We need to fix this law and get it right now.

Secondly, several of my Democrat colleagues have put forward the idea that you should still need court approval to eavesdrop on foreigners in foreign countries. It takes about 200 man-hours to develop a probable cause statement, a packet to go to the court, it's about that thick, to get approval from a court to do a wiretap.

Now, these people who have to put these together are not clerks or even lawyers. They are experts in counterterrorism, and their time is much better spent tracking these people than putting together paperwork.

More importantly, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was never intended to put a U.S. judge in charge of deciding whether we can listen to foreigners in foreign countries. That is why we spy and what we do. We don't need judges to be considering those kinds of things. And the only reason they are is because technology has changed faster than the law.

FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was never intended to require warrants to listen to foreigners in foreign countries. In 1978, when the law was written, almost all long-haul communications were over the air. That's where international calls were. Almost all local calls were on a wire. When they wrote the act, they froze the law in time. They required a warrant for anything on a wire. And over-the-air communications didn't require a warrant at all because that's where we collect foreign intelligence.

In a bill that comes to this floor, we need to do two things. First, no warrant or court intervention should be required to listen to foreign terrorists in foreign countries. Speed matters. And, second, we must continue to require warrants to listen to people in the United States. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance law was intended to protect the civil liberties of Americans. It was intended, and has done actually a very good job at rolling back the abuses that the intelligence community was involved in in the 1950s and 1960s.

Let's get this court back to focusing what it was intended to do, which is to protect the civil liberties of Americans, and allow our intelligence community to do what they are intended to do, which is to keep this country safe and prevent the next terrorist attack.

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Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. Mr. Speaker, the Director of National Intelligence has said that there are things we should be listening to which we are not getting.

All of us remember where we were on the morning of 9/11, remember who we were with, what we were wearing, what we had for breakfast.

I would guess that nobody listening to me here today, or very few, remember where they were the day that the British Government arrested 16 people who were within 48 hours of walking on to airliners at Heathrow and blowing them up over the Atlantic. It was successful intelligence cooperation between the British, Pakistani and American Governments that prevented that attack. And you don't remember it because it didn't happen.

Intelligence is the first line of defense in the war on terror, and we must fix this law and get it right.

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