Floor Statements

I thank my colleague from Texas, and I also thank him for his leadership on this issue. It has been a tremendous help to this body to have people who have actually worked and tried to enact and implement the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to come and be able to explain why it doesn't work in the way it is intended to work in a time of terror.

I think it is important for people to understand, what is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and why do we

have it. In the 1950s and the 1960s, there were abuses by our intelligence agencies where they were wiretapping Americans without warrants. In fact, a friend of mine gave me a copy once of a declassified memorandum signed by Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover that authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King. So there were abuses in the 1950s and 1960s, and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was put in place. The intention of it was to say if you want to collect foreign intelligence in the United States, and there are reasons to do so, you go to a special court called the FISA Court and get a warrant.

There are folks we suspect of being spies who are here in the United States, people working for the Soviet Union, at that time, or Cuba or China, and you want to be able to go to a court and get a warrant to listen to someone in the United States. And the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court was set up for that purpose. But it was written in a way that was technology specific.

In 1978, that was the year I graduated from high school. The telephone was on the wall in the kitchen, and it still had a dialy- thing in the middle. It wasn't even a push-button phone at my house. The Internet didn't exist. Cell phones were Buck Rogers stuff. So the law was written in a technology-specific way that said over-the-air communications you can listen to, you don't need a warrant for that. And at the time, almost all international calls were over the air. They were bounced over a satellite. But to touch a wire in the United States, it is presumed to be a local call and you need a warrant.

Of course today, the situation is reversed. There are over 200 million cell phones in America, and all of that communication is bouncing over the air. But that is not what we need for foreign intelligence and to prevent another terrorist attack.

So, ironically, we now have a law written specific to 1978 technology which does not protect local calls and does protect international calls. Why, because today almost all international calls are over a wire or a fiberoptic cable. And because of the way that global telecommunications is now routed, telecommunications now follow the path of least resistance, and it is entirely probable that a phone call from northern Spain to southern Spain may transit the United States because that might be the path of least resistance. Likewise, a call from Afghanistan to Pakistan or a call from the Horn of Africa to Saudi Arabia may well transit the United States. But in order to listen to that communication, if you touch a wire in the United States, our courts were saying you have to have a warrant.

So we now have the situation that was building up last year where we had intelligence agencies trying to develop statements of probable cause to get a warrant to touch a wire in the United States to listen to foreigners in foreign countries principally for the issue of preventing terrorism because terrorists use commercial communications. And so we had this huge backlog of requests. And it is worse than just the time it takes to develop a case for probable cause or to go to the courts and the time it takes our experts to be able to take time away from actually listening to terrorists to explain to other lawyers and judges why they believe someone is affiliated with a terrorist group. Sometimes you can't meet that high standard of probable cause.

Think about this for a second. If we are trying to get a warrant on someone here in the United States because we believe they are involved with organized crime, you have all of law enforcement to go out and look at what they are doing and talk to their neighbors and so on. If you have someone who is a suspected terrorist living in the Horn of Africa, you can't send the FBI out to talk to their neighbors. Sometimes the probable cause standard is too high to meet; and as a result, by the middle of last year, we had lost two-thirds of our intelligence collection on terrorism. The law had to be changed.

In the first week of August we changed it with the Protect America Act. Eighteen days ago that act expired. Now, to their credit, they worked through the backlog in that 6 months and they were able to get collections started on that whole backlog of intelligence collection related to terrorism. Those won't expire for a year. But here's the problem. New tips come in every day.

I sometimes go out and visit our intelligence agencies in my role as the ranking member of the Technical and Tactical Intelligence Subcommittee. Sometimes the director of that particular agency will say, Congresswoman, I know you are here to get a briefing on such and such a program, but I want you to know the threats we are following today. This is who we are looking for today. This is the tip we got yesterday that we are trying to track down. We have 12 terrorists who transited Madrid who just finished training in Pakistan. We are trying to figure out where they are going. We think we know the throw-away cell phone numbers that they picked up in the rail station in Bonn. We need to listen to them to figure out their plans, capabilities, and intentions. Are they going to kill Americans tomorrow?

That's why this is so important. We have to match the terrorists stride for stride, and we can't afford to have delays in intelligence collection when we are trying to prevent another terrorist attack.

If the gentleman would yield for a question, is it true that if we have soldiers in a war zone, whether it is Iraq or Afghanistan, if we have soldiers in a war zone, that they may actually be authorized to shoot an insurgent, but they have to go back to talk to lawyers in Washington in order to listen to them? Is that true?

If the gentleman would yield for a question, is it true that under the Protect America Act, in the Senate bill, the bipartisan Senate bill that we should vote here on this floor on as soon as possible, is it true that it is still against the law to listen to an American in the United States? Do you still need a warrant to listen?

If the gentleman would yield, there are some fallacies about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that I think we need to put to rest.

One is there is an emergency provision, you can just listen to this stuff and go to the court 72 hours from now. You have an emergency provision. It is true there is an emergency provision, but you have to develop the whole case for probable cause and present it to the Attorney General who has to stand in the shoes of the judge. So you have to get all of the work done; you just don't have the final signoff for a judge. And the time problem occurs before you get to that point. It is to develop the whole case for probable cause.

I have seen one of these packets. It is sometimes close to 2 inches thick of paper that explains how you meet all of the requirements of the act. When it really matters, when we had three soldiers who were kidnapped in Iraq, it took over 24 hours to get an emergency warrant.

I don't know whether that would have saved our soldiers or not. We thought we had a tip on who it was that had kidnapped them. I don't know if it would have been fast enough even if we would have been able to turn it on immediately. But I know if they were my kids, a 24-hour delay is not good enough, and we should expect more from our Government.

I thank my colleague.

In fact, one of the reasons that attorney generals and the Fraternal Order of Police are so strongly in support of this legislation is that they worry that what's happening to our telecommunication companies because of their cooperation with the government on terrorism will also extend and poison the relationship between law enforcement and our telephone companies.

There are at least 15 States where we have over 25 lawsuits, some of them against telephone companies that weren't even involved, and those who are involved can't defend themselves in civil court without revealing to the terrorists how we're collecting intelligence on them and compromising our national security. I'm convinced, having looked at this, that they actually have immunity. They just can't prove it. And it is up to this Congress to clarify that companies that cooperated with the U.S. Government in helping us prevent terrorism through electronic surveillance are immune from civil liability lawsuits. I think the law is clear. It's up to the Congress to step up and reaffirm it quite clearly.

My colleague from Georgia says, and he's right, that this is kind of a difficult-to-understand technical subject in some respects. But there are some things that aren't difficult to understand. I mean, we all remember where we were the morning of 9/11. We remember who we were with, what we had for breakfast, what we were wearing, who we called first to check to see if they were okay.

Very few Americans remember where they were in August of 2006 when the British government arrested 16 people who were within 48 hours of walking onto airliners at Heathrow and blowing them up simultaneously over the Atlantic. One of the terrorists that was involved intended to bring his wife and his 6-month-old baby with him so that they'd all die together. Comprehend that evil for a moment. You're willing to kill your own 6-month-old child in order to blow up an airliner. If that had happened, more people would have died that day than died on the morning of 9/11. But you don't remember it because it didn't happen. And it didn't happen because of cooperation between the British, American and Pakistani intelligence services. Forty-eight hours. They were within 48 hours.

How much time should we wait while lawyers gather in Washington to develop cases for probable cause to get a warrant on a foreigner in a foreign country?

I yield back to my colleague from Texas.

It's not even the majority. The majority of this House, a bipartisan majority of this House, would pass this bill tonight if the liberal Democratic leadership would allow a vote. That's the thing that's so frustrating to me. This is a bill that passed with 68 votes in the Senate. It's pending on the floor of this House. The liberal Democratic leadership who, to a person, opposed the Protect America Act in August is blocking the will of the majority of the House of Representatives that wants to protect this country. They're standing in the way of protecting this country and letting the majority work its will.

Why? Because they're concerned about lawsuits against telephone companies and the deep pockets of the telecommunications industry, with trial lawyers saying, hey, aren't you with us.

Well, this majority in this House, led by the Republicans in this House, know that national security is the priority of the country, not protecting the trial lawyers.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I think there are two points that haven't been made tonight that I do

think are worth making concerning the Protect America Act, which we hope to make permanent in the bill that's come over here from the Senate to fix the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

But one of the points that hasn't been made is that the Senate bill that has passed, that's pending on this floor, actually has stronger civil liberties protections for Americans than in the original 1978 law. In fact, Admiral McConnell and Attorney General Mukasey said in a letter on the 22nd of February, ``We note that the privacy protections for Americans in the Senate bill exceed the protections contained in both the Protect America Act and the House bill.''

So, in fact, one of the things that has changed under this new piece of Senate legislation is that if you are an American, wherever you are in the world, if you're known to be an American, you have the protections of the American Constitution. That's not the case under the 1978 FISA law. So, there is actually more civil liberties protections for Americans on the bill that is on the floor of the House than there is under existing statute.

And the second thing that I think is worth pointing out is that after 9/11 the President turned to his advisers and everyone in all the intelligence agencies and said, you know, what tools do we have? How can we prevent another terrorist attack? How can we find out what their plans and capabilities and intentions are? The fact is that the terrorist threat is much different than the threat that we faced in the height of the Cold War. I was an Air Force officer in Europe during the Cold War. And the Soviets were a very convenient enemy from an intelligence point of view. They had a very big footprint. We knew where they were. We knew what they had. They had exercises the same time every year out of the same barracks using the same radio frequencies. They would have been very difficult to defeat, but we knew where they were.

With the terrorist threat, the problem is completely reversed. If we can find them, we can stop them. The problem is finding them. And, in general, they are using commercial communications. So, instead of being one ugly monster in the forest where you know where they are like the Soviets were, it's more like a ``Where's Waldo'' problem. Can you find the person in the clutter of everything else? That puts the premium on good intelligence.

And particularly, in the case of terrorism, electronic surveillance has been one of our most important tools because they are hiding and using commercial communications. That has been one of our strongest tools in preventing terrorist attacks for the last 6 years. And I must say that I believe that the greatest accomplishment of the last 6\1/2\ years has been what has not happened. We have not had another terrorist attack on our soil since the morning of 9/11. And they have tried. It has been good intelligence that has kept this country safe. And for the last 18 days, we have been building another intelligence gap, and this body must act to close it.

I want to thank the gentleman from Texas, and I won't take the 2 minutes, but I wanted to thank him for his leadership and persistence. This is going to get fixed because we will not rest until it's fixed, and it is critical to the country that it be fixed.

It is now up to the liberal Democrat leadership to listen to the will of this body and pass the Senate bill that will close the intelligence gap.

I yield back to my colleague.

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from California has said that we are trying to work

something out on FISA, and the majority has been trying to engage the minority on FISA and it is really too bad we won't participate.

I have to tell my colleague from California that I am the ranking member on the Technical and Tactical Intelligence Subcommittee, and I have been invited to no meetings. The ranking member of the entire House Committee on Intelligence has been invited to no meetings. And the reason is that there has been no motion to go to conference on the FISA bill, and there is a difference within the Democratic Caucus. You can't even come talk to us until you resolve your own problems internally, because the reality is that a majority of this body, Democrats and Republicans, want to immediately take up this bill that will close the gap in our intelligence collection that has existed now for 11 days.

The rule that we are being asked to consider today actually tables the FISA legislation. And if the rule is defeated, we will immediately bring up the Senate bill that closes this critical intelligence gap.

You don't have to believe me. Senator Rockefeller, on the floor of the United States Senate 12 days ago, said, ``People have to understand around here that the quality of intelligence we are going to be receiving is going to be degraded. Is going to be degraded. It's already going to be degraded.''

The Senate bill will reestablish the procedures that we set up in August to listen to foreigners in foreign countries without a warrant, to require warrants for Americans, and put in place stronger civil liberty protections than we had in the base bill that has been in existence since 1978, and will provide liability protection for our partners in this effort and tools to compel assistance similar to those that are under the criminal wiretap procedures.

Americans need to understand that the Senate has passed a bill to close this intelligence gap. That bill could be passed on the floor of this House today and the President would sign it. We are operating today under outdated procedures that are delaying our ability to listen rapidly to new tips that come in today.

I have been out to our intelligence agencies, and sometimes they start out by saying, Congresswoman, I know you are here to look at a particular program, but I want you to look at what we are tracking today. This is what we are trying to find out today. Here are the five people we are worried about most today. Here are the terrorists that we think are transiting Madrid. They have just come from Pakistan. We don't know where they are going and what they are planning.

We are trying to disrupt and stop terrorist attacks every single day in this country, and the minority, the Democrat liberal leadership of this House, refuses to bring to the floor of this House a bill that will close that gap, and you are compromising the security of this country by doing so. I urge a ``no'' vote on this rule.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity

to talk to folks this evening about something that's critical to our country. Ten days ago a very important law was allowed to expire. It's called the Protect America Act, and it made changes to our foreign intelligence surveillance laws.

We passed the Protect America Act in August of this last year to close a gap in our intelligence collection caused by changes in technology. Unfortunately, that law had a sunset in it. It expired after 6 months.

The Senate passed a bill, a bipartisan bill, overwhelmingly in the Senate, and sent it over to the House. I believe that that bill, if it were brought up on the floor of this House, would pass overwhelmingly here as well. Consideration of that legislation is being blocked by the liberal Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives, and it is putting all of us as Americans at very serious risk.

Ten days. Ten days we've been going without the ability to listen to foreigners in a foreign country without a warrant because the Protect America Act has been allowed to expire.

I wanted to take this opportunity tonight, with some of my colleagues, to explain why this matters, what the foreign intelligence surveillance laws are, why we should care.

Now, I believe that the greatest accomplishment of the last 6 years has been what has not happened. We've not had another terrorist attack on our soil since the morning of 9/11. And they have tried.

The first line of defense against terrorism is good intelligence. The intelligence problem has changed since the Cold War when I served in the military. In the Cold War, our biggest enemy was the Soviet Union, and we had no doubt about where they were. In some ways they were a very convenient enemy. They had exercises from the same barracks every year at the same time using the same ray of lines and the same radio frequencies. They were very easy to find. Had they ever attacked us, they would have been very difficult to defeat; but we know where they were. We know what their capabilities were.

Today, the problem has completely changed. We have terrorist networks that are hiding in the midst of civil society using commercial telecommunications. If we can find out what they're doing, we can stop them and prevent another terrorist attack. It's almost like it's a Where's Waldo problem. You have to find Waldo who's hiding in the midst of regular, everyday confusion. If we can find him, we can stop him. The hard part is the intelligence problem. It is finding him. It's uncovering what their plans and capabilities and intentions are. And so that's why these laws make so much difference.

We need to be able to listen to communications among foreigners in foreign countries, do so very quickly, so that we can act on tips as soon as we get them, and use our great strengths in telecommunications to uncover what our enemies are trying to do and prevent another terrorist attack by then using our law enforcement, our military, our financial networks to shut down and arrest and, in some cases, eliminate these terrorist threats.

I want to talk a little bit about what the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is for, and then one of my colleagues has joined me here from Oregon, and I will yield to him whenever he is ready to speak.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was put in place in 1978. It was as a result of some abuses by the intelligence community where they had been listening to Americans, and it puts in place protections for Americans so that if you are in America and, for foreign intelligence reasons, the government wants to listen to you, they think you are a spy, you have to go to a court and get a warrant. That's the basics of it. But we do not require warrants and we never have under, or it was never intended under the initial law to require warrants to listen to people overseas.

America spies on its enemies. We are trying to figure out what the North Koreans are intending to do, whether they have developed a nuclear weapon, whether they're going to sell that materiel to someone. Likewise, we are trying to figure out what is going on in Venezuela or in Iran or Syria or any hotspot around the world. We seek, through our intelligence agencies, to know the plans and capabilities and intentions of other countries and groups around the world who may harm us. We spy.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act says that you cannot do that on a U.S. person in the United States without going to a special court set up for that purpose and getting a warrant saying you have probable cause to believe that this American is an agent of a foreign power or this person is in America.

But the problem is technology changed. In 1978, that was the year that I graduated from high school, the telephone was something that was on the wall in the kitchen. The word ``Internet'' didn't exist. There were no such things as cell phones. I mean, that was Buck Rogers stuff. Technology changed, but the law did not change to keep pace with technology.

Under the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they made a distinction among technology. It said, if it bounces over the air, you don't need a warrant no matter where you are listening. That's because at that time almost all international calls bounced over the air over satellites. At the time in 1978, almost all local calls were over a wire. And so the law was written that said if you touch a wire in the United States, you have got to have a warrant. You are presumed to be impacting a U.S. person. So it was technology-specific for that moment in time.

But technology has changed. Today, almost all international traffic goes over a wire or a fiber-optic cable. And in complete reverse from 1978, there are over 2 million cell phones in this country. So a majority now of local calls actually bounce over the air. So we needed to modernize the law so it was no longer technology specific. And what happened over a period of 1 year or 2 was that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court started saying no matter where a person is, if you are trying to listen to somebody in Pakistan, talk to somebody else in Pakistan, you needed to get a warrant if you sought to collect that communication by touching a wire in the United States.

This created havoc with our intelligence collection, particularly with fast-moving terrorist targets, and we were losing access to intelligence information from overseas. You can understand why, because you know it's kind of hard to develop a case for probable cause for somebody who is overseas potentially talking to somebody else overseas. I mean, it is not like you can have the FBI go and talk to their neighbors.

So a problem built that was compromising America's security.

I would be happy to yield to my colleague from Oregon.

Madam Speaker, one of the things that bothers me about this is that one of the frustrations is that we can't talk about specific instances, but the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral McConnell, has said very clearly, and now publicly, we've lost intelligence.

On one of my visits to one of our intelligence agencies where I was there to oversee a particular program and get briefed on it, but when we started out the briefing, the director of that agency said, Congresswoman, I just want you to get a flavor for our highest priority threads we are following today, and he passed a sheet across the table for me to look at what exactly they were trying to, you know, the tips that they had, the leads that they had that day that they were trying to listen in to disrupt attacks on this country.

It is a very dynamic situation where you get a tip today, do we have 12 terrorists that are transiting Spain, that are coming from Pakistan, where are they going? They picked up cell phones. We think we have the numbers. Can we listen to them before they move to someplace else and before they move to another number? Can we be as fast as they are, because if we are not, the consequences are devastating.

And all of us remember where we were the morning of 9/11. Almost no American remembers where you were the morning that the British Government arrested 16 people who were within 48 hours of walking onto airliners at Heathrow and blowing them up simultaneously over the Atlantic, within 48 hours of killing thousands of Americans who were just flying from Heathrow to JFK or La Guardia. We don't remember it because it didn't happen. And it didn't happen because of the expertise of our intelligence agencies and cooperation with the British and Pakistani Governments. We figured it out before they walked through security at Heathrow, and people didn't die.

I yield to my colleague from Oregon.

Reclaiming my time, there are a number of things that bother me most about this, but here in this House, I believe that if this bill were brought up for a vote on the floor of the House, it would pass with the same overwhelming bipartisan majority that it passed the Senate and it would be signed by the President, and we would close the gap that is putting Americans at risk.

And we have a small number of people who are liberal Democrats in the elected leadership who are blocking the will of this House. They are preventing this bill from coming to the floor that would pass overwhelmingly if we had the opportunity to vote. And the will of the country is that we fix this problem, and they are standing in the way of the will of the country.

We are joined by my colleague from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey), and I would be happy to yield to him if he would like to join us.

The key change in the Protect America Act, and also in the Senate bill that is now being blocked here on the floor of the House, is to allow American intelligence to listen to foreigners in foreign countries without a warrant, even if the point of access to that communication is a wire here in the United States. That's really the fundamental change. It has very strong privacy protections for Americans. Americans, wherever they may be, whether you're off in Germany on vacation with your family, you're an American, you have protections and rights under our Constitution. Foreigners in foreign countries do not have those rights under our Constitution, and we are seeking to gather information on terrorist targets overseas.

So it's foreigners in foreign countries. And it just has to do with touching a wire in the United States to gather that information. And it says if the point of access happens to be a wire in the United States, that doesn't matter. What matters is you reasonably believe they are a foreigner in a foreign country.

I yield to my colleague from Oregon.

If the gentleman will yield.

It was actually a situation like that which caused me to say enough is enough, we have to get this fixed. It was last May, and at the time we couldn't talk about it, but it's been talked about publicly since then.

We had soldiers who were kidnapped in Iraq. We had, we thought, a tip on who might have done it. And there was an army of lawyers here in Washington and over a 24-hour delay in listening to communications because they had to touch a wire in the United States. I mean, you think about it, it's your kid, it's your kid that's been kidnapped. All of us are familiar here in America with the AMBER alerts. Speed matters when someone's been kidnapped, and you want to get information out as quickly as possible to try to save somebody. If it was your kid who was in a combat zone who has been kidnapped by insurgents, and we've got a room full of lawyers in Washington trying to get a warrant to listen to the communications of the insurgents that took him? That's not good enough. It's not good enough. And we should expect more of our government than that. And the responsibility for fixing it rests right here in this body.

We've got this odd situation with soldiers overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Philippines in dangerous situations where they've got the authority to shoot an insurgent, but they can't listen to him without a warrant. Where is the sense in that?

That's right.

I yield to my colleague from Pennsylvania.

And it's even worse than that. You've got your two cell phones there. If the soldiers were able to intercept between that insurgent's cell phone and the tower that it's going to, that's all fine; you don't need a warrant for that. It's only if it happens to route through the United States and you touch the wire where it's actually easier to listen to it that you need a warrant. So it depends on the point of collection. This is stupid.

I yield back to my colleague from Pennsylvania.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

I yield to my colleague from Oregon.

And one of the things that baffles me is to be able to hear the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral McConnell, say those things, to have very clear testimony both publicly and privately that the problems they predicted are actually taking place, and yet the Democratic leadership in the House is still in a state of denial, just hoping that we don't miss something important.

Now, you kind of wonder, why on Earth are they willing to take this risk? Why are they willing to put the rest of us at risk? And I have difficulty understanding that. And I listened to some of my colleagues on the floor of the House here in the debate last week when one of my Democratic colleagues actually said that he thought that listening to foreigners in foreign countries without a warrant was suspicious and disrespectful.

He said it was suspicious and disrespectful to listen to foreigners in foreign countries without a warrant.

And I couldn't believe he said it. I just couldn't believe it. As if this is about America being polite to terrorists.

I yield to my colleague from Pennsylvania.

One of the things that I think we need to dispel is a couple of myths, and they are myths being promulgated by the Democratic leadership that is blocking the will of the majority in this House from passing this legislation. And one of them is that, oh, well, we can start emergency surveillance, emergency wiretaps in a matter of minutes. It's really just not that big a deal, when, in fact, that's not true.

The requirement under the existing law is that the Attorney General can start a wiretap without going to the court in an emergency, but he has to stand in the shoes of the court. He has to certify that all the elements of probable cause to get a warrant are already

there. So all of the material that would be presented to the court has to be completely worked up. And we found in the real world when it really mattered, we had three soldiers that were kidnapped in Iraq, it took over 24 hours to gather the information, build the case for probable cause. And some of my colleagues said, well, you know, you should have just gone ahead and done it and we would have just taken care of it after the fact. We had testimony in front of the Intelligence Committee where the chairman actually said that. And I looked at the young man who was there who was a member of the intelligence community, and I said, Is it true that initiating a wiretap without authority is a felony?

And he said, Yes, ma'am, it is.

I said, Would you be willing to risk a felony, hoping that this body would somehow cut you some slack or the prosecutor wouldn't go after you?

And he said, I'm an officer of the court. I'm a lawyer. I can't knowingly commit a felony. I can't do that.

I yield to my colleague from Pennsylvania.

The sad thing in this city is that we have people taking tremendous risks on our behalf under complete orders to do so, that we're certified, we're lawful and everything else, and they are so afraid of the kind of after-the-fact inquiries that this body can levy on them that they have taken out liability insurance so that they are not bankrupted by the actions of this Congress.

I yield to my colleague from Oregon.

If my colleague would think about that for a second, you've got a tip. Most people know that a lot of big cities have gang units. Put this in this context. You got a tip that somebody may be a terrorist overseas, but really all you have is maybe a name and maybe a phone number. That's not enough to get probable cause for a warrant. So you've got to be able to amass why is it that you think this is the person. What relationships do they have? You have to build up this whole case. And unlike something in America where it would be the gang unit in the Albuquerque Police Department or the Washington Police Department, we're talking about people in foreign countries. It's not as though you can send the FBI out to talk to their neighbors to build a case for probable cause to get a warrant to believe that this person is affiliated with a terrorist organization. So in many cases you cannot even reach that standard to get a wiretap in an emergency situation because the probable cause standard was set up to protect Americans who have rights under our Constitution with respect to law enforcement investigations. This is applying a whole body of law to something it was never really intended to be applied to.

I yield to my colleague from Georgia.

I yield to my colleague from Oregon.

In fact, the Senate bill for privacy protections for Americans are stronger than the Protect America Act and stronger than current law under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act really focused on technology. It was technology specific and assumed that things that were on a wire were local calls in the United States. Well, we have said that's changed. The bill that we want to bring up and pass in the House has very strict protections for Americans wherever they are and for anyone reasonably believed to be in the United States.

Now, there are some folks who think if somebody's not a citizen or if they are here in the country illegally, you should be able to listen to them. This bill doesn't even authorize that. It has very strict protections for Americans in the United States or for Americans wherever they happen to be.

Now, we collect intelligence. We spy overseas. When I was an officer stationed overseas, one of my jobs at one post was to negotiate with the Soviets back when the Soviets existed. We knew who the KGB guy was in their delegation. If we happened to intercept his report back to Moscow and it mentioned me, there were already procedures in place to mask or so-called minimize the existence of an American that we may have picked up intelligence overseas. This law actually strengthens that. The bipartisan bill that we'd like to see passed here strengthens it even further so that if I am an American businessperson living in Germany, they'd have to actually get a warrant to listen to me in Germany, which is a stronger protection than we have ever had before.

I yield to my colleague from Pennsylvania.

Madam Speaker, we have been joined by my colleague from Texas, who is one of the few Members of this House who has direct experience in working with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when he worked for the Justice Department.

I would be happy to yield to him.

I yield to my colleague from Pennsylvania.

We are very close to the time being up in the hour that we have had this evening. But I think it is important to summarize some of the things we have talked about here tonight.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was intended to protect the civil liberties of Americans while also allowing our intelligence agencies to collect the intelligence information that can protect us. That is all it was intended to do. But it has become outdated because of changes in technology.

We have a bill that has been passed in the Senate by 68 votes. There has been a letter from 20 Democrats to their own leadership saying, please, take up this bill because we want to vote for it. We all know here that if we were allowed to vote on this bill, it would pass overwhelmingly in the House, and the President has already said that he would sign it. Instead, we are here tonight, 10 days after a law expired, that our Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Mike McConnell, has said has already degraded our ability to gather intelligence on the people who are trying to kill Americans. I think that is inexcusable.

I think we made a decision as a country on the morning of 9/11. We made a decision that we were going to go on offense. We were going to play away games because the home games cost too much.

I want the leaders of al Qaeda hiding in a hole in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan wondering whether they can use their cell phones without being detected by American Special Forces, rather than Americans using their cell phones to call home one last time. That is the difference.

As my colleagues from Texas and Pennsylvania said, God forbid, God forbid that we have to have another 9/11 Commission, that we have another terrorist attack. I believe that the greatest accomplishment of the last 6 years has been what has not happened. There has not been another terrorist attack on our soil, and they have tried. Our first line of defense in preventing another terrorist attack is good intelligence. And because this law expired 10 days ago, we are tying the hands of the intelligence agencies who are sworn to protect us. We are making it harder for them. We are making them jump through hoops that in some cases are too high and taking tremendous risks for the American people. Why? Because a minority of Democrats, including their leadership, refuse to allow a bipartisan bill to be brought up on the floor of this House. Shame on them. Shame on them for not putting the security of this country first.

If we have that other commission after another terrorist attack, they are going to be saying, why didn't you protect us? What you are seeing tonight is why. You can't connect the dots unless you can collect the dots in the first place. This is about allowing our intelligence agencies to collect the dots that can protect us.

I would urge the Democratic leadership, as my colleague from Pennsylvania said, to take ``yes'' for an answer, to fix this problem, to close this gap this week. We have nine suspensions on the floor. We are naming post offices tomorrow. Pull it up tomorrow. And I will stand here shoulder to shoulder with them on the floor of this House, we will overwhelmingly pass it, and we can walk down to the White House tomorrow afternoon so that the President can sign it and protect this country.

I yield the balance of our time.

Mr. Speaker, one of the most important laws that is preventing another terrorist attack in this country will expire on Friday. It expires on Friday.

My colleague from New York says, well, we just need to take enough time and be deliberative and so on. My colleague from New York didn't vote for the temporary fix that we passed in August. In fact, in an exchange with him that I remember so well, he questioned whether we should extend the constitutional protections of the fourth amendment to people who are foreigners in a foreign country talking to each other.

The temporary fix that we made in August needs to be made permanent, and we need to move forward with a permanent law that allows our intelligence agencies to listen to foreigners in foreign countries without a warrant while protecting the civil liberties of Americans. That's what we passed in August. That's what the Rockefeller-Bond bill does from the Senate, and they passed it last night. We passed a 6- month bill in August. We had 6 months to review this. And then when that deadline passed on the 1st of February, they said, well, just give us another 15 days. We gave them another 15 days and they said, well, we really haven't had the time to look at this paper.

You've had almost 7 months. The time is now to get serious about our national security and giving our intelligence agencies the tools they need to prevent the next terrorist attack.

The Senate passed the Rockefeller-Bond bill last night by a vote of 68-29. It makes permanent the authorities that we passed in August of last year to listen to foreigners in foreign countries without a warrant. We spy on our enemies. We try to find out what their plans are so that we can stop them from killing Americans.

That Rockefeller-Bond bill also provides protection from lawsuits for the American companies that stepped up to the plate when this country was in crisis. In good faith, those American companies partnered with the U.S. Government, under instructions from that government, from our own government, to move forward and to help us to prevent another terrorist attack. And, ironically, they cannot defend themselves against lawsuits because the government says to do so would violate state secrets. It would give away secrets to our enemies. So they're stuck in court not even being able to defend themselves.

The cooperation that is being protected here in the Rockefeller-Bond bill is long established in criminal law and should certainly extend to the national security realm.

Today, I circulated a letter from 21 bipartisan attorneys general supporting these lawsuit protection provisions. Our intelligence agencies and their partners in private industry need certainty, the telecommunications companies whom we depend upon to cooperate need certainty, and our intelligence agents need certainty that we're not going to keep operating our intelligence community on a month-to-month basis.

In August we closed an intelligence gap, a vital gap that has been now closed, and the changes that we made have already provided intelligence that the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Mike McConnell, has said

have helped us to disrupt terrorist attacks.

Intelligence is the first line of defense in protecting this country against terrorism. I would urge my colleagues to allow a vote today on the Rockefeller-Bond legislation, do not allow this bill to expire, and stand up and protect this country.

Madam Speaker, on December 12, 2007, Terry Yates, Vice President for Research and Economic Development at the University of New Mexico passed away. He was a remarkable scientist and professor, and UNM has suffered a great loss with his passing. He lived a life full of enthusiasm for science. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife Nancy, their sons and his entire family.

Terry Yates came to the University of New Mexico in 1978 as an assistant professor of biology, and went on to become a professor of biology and pathology. He helped create the Long Term Ecological Research site outside Socorro, New Mexico, and he was the curator of Genomic Resources for the Museum of Southwestern Biology on the UNM campus.

Terry Yates was appointed Vice Provost for Research in 2004, and served as Vice President for Research and Economic Development from 2004 until his death. During this time as Vice Provost and Vice President, Terry increased the total amount of research awards from $247 million to nearly $300 million.

UNM's President, David Schmidly, taught Terry as a graduate student at Texas Tech University in the mid-1970s. ``It was his exuberance you remember most about Terry. He was always ready to examine a new idea or take a trip to the field to explore a theory. I think he was happier out in the field than he was behind a desk,'' said Schmidly.

Terry was best known for his groundbreaking research on the source of Hantavirus, a serious respiratory disease that is frequently fatal. He began his work in 1993, when many people in the Southwest began dying from an unknown viral disease. In collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Terry examined specimens that he had collected over several years, that were residing in the museum of Southwest Biology. Through his study, he was able to pinpoint a species of deer mice as the carrier of the Sin Nombre virus. The National Science Foundation named this research done by Terry and partner Robert Parmeter as one of its ``Nifty 50'' discoveries--projects funded that have had the biggest impact on American lives.

Most recently, Terry published a paper on the relationship between weather and deer mice populations. He and his co-authors were able to predict increased health risks posed by deer mice to humans in specific parts of the Four Corners area. This research also provided the New Mexico Department of Public Health with the necessary scientific evidence required to give advanced warning to people living in specific parts of the state that they face increased risk of exposure to Hantavirus.

He has published a total of 126 research papers.

Terry was an honorary member of the Board of Life Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as an honorary member of the Society of Mammalogists. This is the highest honor that the Society bestows upon an individual.

While his professional enthusiasm was for research and pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, Terry loved people and had friends from all walks of life. Every year, on Kentucky Derby Day, Terry had a party at his house complete with mint juleps. But he insisted on never sending out invitations. Everyone was welcome and no one was excluded.

Terry Yates was a great mind and a vibrant leader. He fought for life to the very end with humor and grace. Of his final illness, he told people, ``I expect to get some patents out of this!''

He challenged us and inspired us and will deeply be missed.

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Rhode Island talked about the importance of upholding the Constitution, and there is something in the manager's amendment to this bill that was inserted without any hearing in the committee that I don't understand, that makes no sense to me. It is a provision that says, very plainly: This act and the amendments made by this act shall not be construed to prohibit surveillance of, or grant any rights to, an alien not permitted to be in or remain in the United States.

Now, I think there are probably a lot of people on this side of the aisle who don't have a problem with that provision. What I don't understand is why you all are proposing it.

Here is the irony here. This bill will extend rights under our Constitution to foreigners in foreign countries, while denying the protections of the Constitution to some 12 million people who are not legally in the United States, when the case law is clear that they do have rights. Whether we think they should have rights or not, the case law is absolutely clear. So we will deny those rights to people in the United States while extending them to people in foreign countries?

I think we should be clear with the American people why we insisted on fixing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and did so successfully in August. We had soldiers who were kidnapped in Iraq by insurgents.

And because of changes in technology and the demands of the court, the American military had to go to lawyers in the United States to get a warrant to try to intercept the communications of the terrorists trying to kill them. That took time, too much time. And the law had to be fixed.

Soldiers should not need an army of lawyers in Washington to listen to the communications of the enemy that's trying to kill them. This needed to be fixed, and we fixed it the first week of August.

We all remember where we were on the morning of 9/11. We remember who we were with, what we were wearing, what we ate for breakfast.

But people don't remember where they were the day that the British Government arrested 16 people who were within 48 hours of walking on to airliners and blowing them up simultaneously over the Atlantic. We don't remember it because it didn't happen. And the reason it didn't happen is because of exceptional intelligence and the cooperation of the British, Pakistani and American Governments.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 1093 and 1094 I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``nay'' on both votes.

Mr. Speaker, as the sponsor of H. Res. 744, I rise in strong support of this resolution and urge its passage. I want to thank Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin who is an original cosponsor of this resolution and who is a strong advocate for our veterans. I also want to thank Chairman Bob Filner, who cosponsored the resolution and Ranking Member Steve Buyer for his commitment to all veterans.

Earlier this year I met with some Native American veterans in my State. They expressed many concerns to me and were worried that all Native American Veterans had not been recognized for their service to their country.

On October 15, 2007, Congresswoman Herseth Sandlin and I introduced H. Res. 744, a resolution that recognizes the contributions of Native American veterans and calls upon the President of the United States to issue a proclamation urging the United States to observe a day in honor of Native American veterans.

Native Americans were participants in the War of 1812, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. During World War I, 12,000 Native Americans served in the United States military and in World War II, more than 44,000 Native Americans served their country in both the European and Pacific fronts of the war. Native Americans also fought in the Korean conflict and the Vietnam war. In Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, Native Americans have made significant contributions.

Native American veterans should be recognized for their service in uniform. This resolution gives all Native American veterans the formal recognition they deserve for their sacrifices and contributions.

I have also introduced H.R. 4012, the Native American Language Assistance Act of 2007, a bill to assist VA hospitals and clinics that treat a large number of Native American patients. I urge my colleagues to cosponsor this legislation that will ensure that Native American veterans have access, delivery and follow-up of services at the VA.

The bill would require the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to carry out a program to make competitive grants to any VA medical facility that treats a high number of Native American veterans. The grants, up to $100,000 each, would provide interpreters or other language resources to improve access to, delivery of, and follow-up for medical services provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

I am concerned that Indian veterans are. not receiving adequate assistance and support for their care at our VA hospitals. This bill will provide help to those hospitals that treat high numbers of Indians. By providing our VA hospitals with funding for language programs and outreach, we can better communicate to these veterans about what services and benefits are available to them and make sure they are getting the care and support they need.

Nationally, there are 195,871 Native American veterans. There are 11,929 Native American Veterans in New Mexico--3.1 percent of the entire American Indian veteran population.

I am grateful to all who serve their Nation and we as a Congress have a responsibility to ensure they receive the best possible care. In this war on terrorism, the greatest burdens have fallen on the shoulders of a relatively small number of Americans who have volunteered to take great risks on our behalf. Events over the last few years have made a new generation of Americans realize just how precious our freedoms really are. We owe our freedom fighters--past, present, and future--a debt of gratitude for their selflessness and sacrifice. I will continue to fight to ensure that our veterans get the benefits they were promised, the health care they deserve, and the recognition that our Nation owes them.

I support passage of this resolution.

Madam Speaker, there are over two million people incarcerated in the United States, and nearly 6 percent of the adult population is under some form of correctional supervision.

Over the past 25 years, prison populations have grown 377 percent and prison budgets have grown 600 percent. The burden currently borne by the American taxpayer exceeds $162 billion annually.

The U.S. Department of Justice reports that the average criminal recidivism rate in the United States is 65 percent, and nearly two thirds of United States money is spent dealing with recidivism. Recidivism costs taxpayers over $35 billion a year in enforcement costs, and over $17 billion for additional court costs.

Over 80 percent of the crimes in the United States are committed by recidivists. The only continuous factor for the past 25 years linked to recidivism is drug addiction, two-thirds of the prison population recidivate, two-thirds of the prison population is addicted and approximately 90 percent of the incarcerated addicted recidivate.

The Second Chance Program is a secure long-term residential rehabilitation program treating substance abusers in the criminal justice system providing the judiciary an alternative to traditional incarceration.

The purpose of the Second Chance Program is to provide secure, long term rehabilitation and then transition individuals back into society so they can lead a stable life free of crime and drugs.

The Second Chance Program protocol is a non-medical social detoxification model of treatment based on nutrition, exercise and education.

The Second Chance Program has shown in three independent university studies to have a 90 percent success rate, and has been operational and achieving rehabilitation results in New Mexico for 1 year.

Congratulations to the Second Chance Program for successfully completing its first year of servicing the courts of New Mexico.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

I thank the majority leader.

I would also ask, we have had 55 Members who weren't here for the vote that we just had. This issue we're about to debate and vote on is one that's important to people on both sides of the aisle. This is an important vote and important debate, and I think people should have an opportunity to participate in that.

All of us have had circumstances where there are disasters in our district and there are times when the leadership determines that the votes that are scheduled are of such sufficient gravity and importance that it makes sense to delay that.

As the gentleman from Maryland knows, I supported the SCHIP bill. I think we need to reauthorize the SCHIP program, but I am reluctant to do that with so many Members gone and also with our Californians dealing with critical problems in their district.

I would echo my colleague from Texas' sentiments and ask that the leadership consider delaying this vote and this debate until early next week.

I want to make sure I understand something here, because I think you said something that's important. If the United States Government inadvertently collects a phone call that involves an American, if Osama bin Laden himself calls into the United States on a new phone line, and we had no idea, we didn't expect him to call in to America, and he has got a new phone number, he has got one of those disposable phones, he calls in and we get lucky and we pick it up, and that phone call says to one of his cells in the United States, ``Tomorrow is the day. Blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago,'' is it my understanding that under this bill they have put forward the intelligence agents couldn't even tell law enforcement about that? They would be prohibited from that?

So we get the intelligence tip of a lifetime to be able to prevent the next terrorist attack, and this bill, the RESTORE Act, would prevent us from protecting American citizens?

I thank the gentleman for clarifying that, because I think it's an important provision, and I think it is being added into what is being called the RESTORE Act very late in the game before it was pulled from the House floor last week. It is a provision that is deadly dangerous to the security of this country.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was set up to protect the civil liberties of Americans, and it has done that effectively. But because of changes in technology over the last decade in particular, there are more and more conversations that are foreign conversations, international conversations that happen to transit the United States. Under the old law, before we fixed this in early August, you needed a warrant to touch a wire inside the United States even if the person you are targeting is overseas.

Earlier this year, because of some court decisions, this became completely unmanageable, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court became almost completely nonfunctional, with backlogs, with requests for warrants, people who couldn't develop probable cause, because, you think about this, you have got some guy on the Horn of Africa that you suspect of being affiliated with al Qaeda. It's not as if the FBI can go and talk to their neighbors and develop probable cause for a warrant in order to touch a wire in the United States, and yet our intelligence capability is much enhanced if we can touch that wire in the United States.

So you have an odd situation where we're having intelligence agents take tremendous risks to try to collect intelligence overseas, while we're tying our own hands here in the United States. The law that we passed in early August addresses this problem.

The act that was pulled from the floor, so-called RESTORE Act, last week would only have restored the ability of terrorists to plot to kill Americans. It would be suicide for the

United States to intentionally, intentionally cut off our ability to try to listen to the communications of the terrorists who are trying to kill Americans or anybody else.

I would be happy to yield to my colleague from New York.

If the gentleman would yield, the issue of foreign-to-foreign communications is in the bill. But here's the problem. We can put in law that you don't need a warrant to listen to foreign-to-foreign communications, but you're never targeting a communication between two points. You're always looking at one target. And if I am targeting you in Afghanistan, I don't know who you're going to pick up the phone and call next. If it is a felony to listen to a conversation between a foreigner and a U.S. person without a warrant, as soon as that foreigner picks up the phone and dials an American number, you've created a situation where an intelligence agent is a felon. As a result, if you have that provision in the bill, they must get warrants on every foreigner. And that is the situation we were in earlier this year that completely crippled our intelligence collection.

One of the things my colleague from New York said was, well, there are these minimization procedures, and that's true. There are minimization procedures under current law, which means that if you gather information that involves innocent people, you mask their identity, you don't disseminate things that don't matter, and you protect people's privacy. If it only went that far, that would be fine. The problem is the rest of the paragraph that my colleague from California mentioned, which actually prohibits dissemination of information that could be critical to this country.

It is astounding to me that we might actually intercept a conversation involving Osama bin Laden himself that reveals where he is going to be tomorrow and we would prohibit our intelligence agencies from telling the military where he is so they could target him.

Absolute prohibition.

And I think we need to get back to some basics here, which is, number one, the current law requires that you need a warrant to wiretap a U.S. person for the purposes of collection of foreign intelligence. That's what the whole Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was about. But it also makes clear under the law that we passed in the

first week of August that you do not need a warrant to listen to foreigners reasonably believed to be in a foreign country.

America spies. We try to discover the secrets of people who are not our friends, some of whom are trying to kill large numbers of Americans. We do everything we can to find out what their plans and capabilities and intentions are so we can prevent another terrorist attack. That is what our intelligence community does. And to somehow tie this up in red tape with a bunch of lawyers and judges makes no sense to me at all when we are trying to find out the secrets they are desperately trying to protect from us.

I have to say, there is a question, how many lawyers should it take to be allowed to listen to Osama bin Laden? The answer should be zero. That's what the answer should be. We shouldn't involve lawyers and judges in trying to intercept his communications, even if he is talking to an American.

Will the gentleman yield?

I know we are coming to the end of this hour, but I think there is something important for Americans to understand.

We all remember where we were the morning of 9/11. We remember what we were wearing, what we had for breakfast, whom we were with, and that is seared into our memories.

Very few Americans remember where they were when the British Government arrested 16 people who were within 48 hours of walking onto airliners at Heathrow and blowing them up simultaneously over the Atlantic. We don't remember it because it didn't happen. And it didn't happen because American, British, and Pakistani intelligence were working together to disrupt the plot and prevent the terrorist attack.

That is what matters here. We want to stop those memories from being created before the event happens.

Ten years ago, the Children's Health Insurance Program passed with a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. Now we are trying to reauthorize it with a Democratic Congress and a Republican President. We should be able to do this, and we should be able to do it in a bipartisan way.

The Children's Health Insurance Program has reduced the number of uninsured children in this country and has given them access to primary care. They live healthier lives because of it. This is not a great bill, but it is a good bill; and I have supported this bill, and I encourage my colleagues to support it again today.

In particular, it phases out the participation of adults in this program. This program is for kids, for low-income kids, not for adults. And successive administrations have been approving the admission of adults to the program, and that was not its intent.

New Mexico in particular will benefit from this program because it allows lower income kids to be participants in the program. Because of an anomaly of the original law, New Mexico's lowest income kids are not eligible for this program. I would urge my colleagues to vote in favor of the bill today.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from California. I very much appreciate his hosting this Special Order this evening.

Mr. Speaker, before the August break we fixed a problem. It was a problem that grew worse over the course of this year in that we were increasingly hampered in our ability to prevent another terrorist attack on this country because of the change in telecommunications and a law that was woefully outdated.

It's called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was put in place in 1978 to protect the civil liberties of Americans. Think about it. 1978 was the year that I graduated from high school. The telephone hung on the wall in the kitchen. Cell phones had not been invented. The word ``Internet'' did not even exist. Technology has changed since 1978, and the law had not kept pace.

In 1978, almost all long-haul communications went over the air. Almost all international communications went over the air, and they were explicitly exempted from the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Our intelligence community folks would go ahead and collect those communications if they had foreign intelligence value. They minimized or suppressed any involvement of Americans who were innocent and just happened to be referred to in a conversation or

something. But there were no restrictions on foreign intelligence collection.

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, technology has now changed, and what used to be over the air is now almost all on a wire. The courts have found that under the old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, before we changed it in August of this year, that if you touched a wire in the United States, even if you were targeting a foreign terrorist talking to another foreign terrorist who had no connection to the United States at all, then you needed a warrant. This began very rapidly to cripple our intelligence capability with respect to terrorism in particular.

The Director for National Intelligence, Admiral McConnell, has testified in open session that without the changes, without keeping the changes, making them permanent, that we put in place in August, we will lose between one-half and two-thirds of our intelligence collection on terrorism. Think about this for a second.

Now we all remember where we were on the morning of September 11, remember who we were with, what we were wearing, what we had for breakfast. Most Americans don't remember where they were when the British Government arrested 16 people who were within 48 hours of walking onto airliners at Heathrow Airport and blowing them up simultaneously over the Atlantic. They don't remember it because it didn't happen.

The American people want us to prevent the next terrorist attack. They don't want to have to remember where they were when a preventable disaster happened. That is what intelligence gives us, and that is why the Protect America Act is so important and why we have to make it permanent.

Sadly, the Democratic majority is going to bring a bill to the House this week which will gut the progress that we made in early August. They say things in this bill that, on its face, initially you think, well, that makes sense. One of them is you would not need a warrant for any foreign-to-foreign communication.

Well, doesn't that solve the problem? Wait a second. If Mr. Lungren, my colleague from California, was a foreign terrorist, just for the purposes of discussion, how do I know who he is going to call next? I don't. And if the law says that it is a felony to listen to the conversation of someone who is a foreigner calling into the United States, that means as soon as I collect that conversation, as soon as that terrorist makes a phone call into the United States, I become a felon. As a result, you have to have warrants on everyone.

It doesn't relieve the system of this huge legal bureaucracy. It means they have to get warrants on every foreigner in foreign countries, even if they are only talking to foreigners, because they might some day pick up the phone and call an American. And, oh, by the way, that is the conversation we want to be listening to. If we have a terrorist affiliated with al Qaeda calling into the United States, you bet we should be on that conversation. We should be all over that like white on rice. We shouldn't be waiting to get a warrant from a judge in Washington, D.C.

But it gets worse than that. They also put in this bill some things called blanket warrants.

If the gentleman would yield further, that is exactly right. There is already a provision in the law and was in 1978 that if it was foreign-to-foreign communication, you didn't need a warrant.

There are some circumstances where you are tapping into a line that is between a command headquarters of the former Soviet Army and one of their missile silos where it is a dedicated line. But modern telecommunications don't operate that way, and the terrorists who are trying to kill us are using modern commercial telecommunications. They are not using dedicated lines between headquarters. They don't even have headquarters.

Let's just think of an example here. Let's say Osama bin Laden or one of his chief lieutenants did call into the United States to a completely innocent person, a completely innocent person under this law which the Democrats are going to try to pass this week, and what he says in that conversation is ``Don't go to the Sears Tower tomorrow. Stay away from the Sears Tower tomorrow.'' Whoever in the intelligence community gets that communication is barred by law from giving it to anyone who can take any action to prevent a terrorist attack on this country.

You may not even know who the person is being called, other than it is an area code and number in the United States, which means you don't have any probable cause. You have to send the FBI out and find out whose number that is and whether they are reasonably believed to be involved in a crime.

But the threat is immediate. We cannot have our intelligence agencies tied up in legal redtape when they are the first line of defense for this country in the war on terrorism.

I am appalled that we have people in this body who put forward legislation who seem to be more concerned about protecting the civil liberties of terrorists overseas than they are about protecting Americans here at home and preventing the next terrorist attack.

This would be an unprecedented extension of judicial oversight into foreign intelligence operations. We don't even do this in criminal cases, and my colleague is much more experienced in criminal law than I am. But if we are listening to a Mafia kingpin and he happens to call his son's second grade teacher.

Anybody. And we are not prevented from using that information until we get a warrant on the priest or his mother or his son's second grade teacher. The target is the Mafia kingpin.

This legislation will tie our intelligence community in knots in order to protect the civil liberties of terrorists in foreign countries who are trying to kill Americans.

There are some in this body who may believe we shouldn't have intelligence services. I believe it was Hoover who said that gentlemen shouldn't read each other's mail. Well, we are not dealing with gentlemen here. We are dealing with terrorists who are trying to kill Americans and are using commercial communications to talk to each other. We must do everything we can to prevent that terrorist attack, and that means listening to their conversations if we get an opportunity to do so.

I don't think anybody believes that the threat of Islamic terrorism to the United States, or other foreign threats, are somehow going to go away in the next 18 months. That is just not going to happen. What is even worse about this bill, while they set up some system of blanket warrants with respect to some national security matters, they do not allow any so-called blanket warrants for things that are outside of direct threats to the United States, which is unprecedented in foreign intelligence collection.

That means if we are trying to listen to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, or we are trying to figure out whether the leader of Sudan is about to launch another wave of genocide in Darfur, or we want to listen in to what the Chinese or the North Koreans are talking to each other about with respect to the Six-Party Talks and the potential for weapons of mass destruction on the Korean Peninsula, we are absolutely prohibited from listening to those conversations without a warrant from a court in the United States of America. The courts have never been involved in that way. Never in the history of this country, nor should they be. Foreign intelligence collection of foreigners in foreign countries has never been subject to warrants here in the United States.

There is historical precedent for this, one of a Pakistani who ran a criminal enterprise, an international network that was selling nuclear materials and the capability to build nuclear weapons to people and countries around the world. While he was Pakistani by nationality and had helped with the Pakistan Government's weapons program, there was no question that he wasn't acting as an agent of Pakistan, at least I don't think there was. He was running a criminal enterprise for money, and we should be able to listen in and track people like that.

Likewise, I think our foreign intelligence should be able to listen to narco-rings in Burma and be able to detect whether there are cocaine smugglers who are trying to ship drugs into the United States.

These are all foreigners who are doing things that we do not like that are not in our interests and our intelligence capabilities should be used to disrupt those things. This law would shut that down. Shut it down. And Admiral McConnell has been very clear on that.

That is exactly how this law works. If the target is an American, you need a warrant. If the target is a foreigner, you don't need a warrant; foreigner in a foreign country.

I think one of the things that is important to remember here, something that has been the greatest accomplishment in the last 6 years in this country has been what has not happened. We have not had another terrorist attack on our soil. And it is not because they haven't tried.

Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have been very clear: they want to kill millions of Americans, and they will do it if they can.

The question is whether we will use the tools at our disposal, entirely constitutional and legal tools, in order to prevent the next terrorist attack, to stop the attack on the USS Cole, to prevent the planes from taking off from Heathrow to kill thousands of innocent Americans. Intelligence is the first line of defense in the war on terrorism. It is possible to provide our intelligence community with the tools to keep us safe while protecting the civil liberties of Americans, and that is the perspective that the Democrat majority has lost.

When Admiral McConnell appeared before the Judiciary Committee, he wanted to make clear our understanding of the technology of the capture of conversations. And he put it this way: he said when you are conducting surveillance in the context of electronic surveillance, you can only target one end of the conversation. So you have no control over who that number might call or who they might receive a call from. He then went on to say if you require a warrant in circumstances that we have never required before, as is the implication of the bill to be brought before us, he said if you have to predetermine it is a foreign- to-foreign before you do it, it is impossible. That's the point. You can only target one. If you are going to target, you have to program some equipment to say I am going to look at number 1, 2, 3. So targeting in this sense, you are targeting a phone number that is foreign. So that's the target. The point is you have no control over who that target might call or who might call that target.

Is that consistent with your understanding in the years you have been on the Intelligence Committee and the years you have looked at this issue?

That is exactly right. The biggest problem is that the terrorists who are trying to attack us, and even foreign governments, are increasingly using commercial communications. So they don't have dedicated lines between a couple of government buildings. In modern communications, those communications will flow wherever it is fastest to get to wherever they are calling to. Sometimes that call will transit the United States, and we shouldn't require a warrant just because the point of access to that conversation happens to be within the United States.

That is my understanding, and he has testified to that in the Intelligence Committee as well. That is what gets lost here. People seem to think that somehow this impacts the civil liberties of Americans. No, this bill that the Democrats are bringing to the floor this week will extend civil liberties protections to foreigners trying to kill Americans. It will make it harder for our soldiers and our law enforcement folks and our intelligence community to find out when the next attack is coming in order to prevent it.

I don't understand why they are going in this direction. Sometimes I don't think they really understand what they are doing here. Sometimes I think it is not entirely intentional on the part of some of these folks, that they really do not understand how this works and how badly they are crippling American intelligence if they pass this law.

If you think about how the challenge has changed since the Cold War, in the Cold War, we had early warning systems. We had Cheyenne Mountain that was watching early warning systems to see if Soviet bombers were heading towards us or missile systems had launched, immediately scrambling airplanes and taking immediate action to protect this country.

And we had intelligence systems set up to be able to detect and give us that early warning. The problem has changed, but the need for early warning is still there.

Now, what we didn't do when we got a detection that bombers were coming towards the United States was call the lawyers in Washington to see if we could launch our airplanes to protect us. The system was set up to be fast and immediately responsive.

What the Democrats are going to do this week is to say if you get a detection, if you believe you have early warning, that the terrorists are coming to destroy Americans or attack Americans, put that on hold while you go get a warrant, talk to judges, take hours to decide whether we can respond. That will not allow us to protect America.

I thank the gentleman for having this hour tonight.

Madam Speaker, last week on Thursday, September 27, 2007, I was absent for rollcall votes 922 and 923. Had I been present to vote, I would have voted ``yea'' on both rollcall vote 922 and rollcall vote 923.

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from New York, Mr. Rangel, says this is not a House bill; and he's right, it isn't.

When the House first passed its version of this bill, I opposed it, particularly because it funded that House version of the bill through reductions in Medicare spending. This bill is a compromise. It is a much better bill. It's not a great bill, but it's a good bill.

I was a cabinet secretary in New Mexico for children at the time SCHIP was initially implemented. It was established by a Republican Congress and a Democrat President and it works. It gets kids health insurance that they need.

We have big challenges in health care, but this isn't one of them. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I would ask my colleagues to join together and to support this bill tonight for the good of all of us.