Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT -- (House of Representatives - September 25, 2007)

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Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I have been listening to this wonderful dialogue and realizing that I didn't want to interrupt the flow, but one thing I am just struck with is during the Cold War, we knew what our strategy was. It was to contain, to react, and it was mutually assured destruction. I don't think Americans have accepted what the new strategy has to be, and it has to be detect, prevent, preempt, and maybe act unilaterally. If a small group of dedicated scientists can create an altered biological agent that will wipe out humanity as we know it, even Jimmy Carter is not going to wait for permission from anyone.

And my point is, I'm struck by the fact that we make it easier, for instance, to go into a business or a library to catch a common criminal than we do that if we thought a terrorist was potentially using a library even within this country to communicate. And I am just wondering if, in fact, that is true or not. In other words, isn't it true that if I impanel a grand jury, as the attorney, the prosecutor, I can just literally go and demand information from a business or library and get it, but don't we require, when we go after someone who is a terrorist, to literally go to the FISA court, have to swear under oath that the information that we are seeking is important? And I guess my question relates to the fact that, isn't the key to our success with terrorism to break into the cell without the terrorists knowing that we have so that we can then break it down and know what they are going to do before they act?

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Mr. SHAYS. But the bottom line, if the gentleman will further yield, is that we literally have more protections to the potential terrorists than we do for someone involved in organized crime. We make it more difficult, not easier, to get that information. And yet the stakes are so high.

I was in your State at Los Alamos. Is that actually in your district or your neighbor's?

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. It's north.

Mr. SHAYS. What I was struck by was that they showed me a nuclear weapon that they made basically out of material they could have bought at Home Depot. The

only thing they needed was weapons-grade material. So I am struck by the stakes being so high, and yet we want to make it harder, not easier, to get the terrorists than to get the organized crime.

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