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Capitol Comment
by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
Giving Law Enforcement the Tools to Prevent Terrorist Attacks
October 19, 2007
Protecting American lives is my most important duty as your Senator. This is an era in which violent extremists seek to do us harm. They strive to recreate the horrors of September 11th, and they attack our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan daily. We have many tools to help our intelligence community foil terrorist plots overseas and on our soil. But some members of Congress advocate measures that would take away crucial intelligence assets, and cripple our counter-terrorism efforts worldwide. We must be equipped to intercept calls between terrorists in order to prevent attacks they plan.
Last August, I worked with my colleagues to pass the Protect America Act of 2007. This important legislation amended and modernized the decades-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). Today, our enemies utilize cell phones, wireless Internet networks and countless other technologies that were not in place when FISA was enacted 30 years ago. Consequently, the lawmakers of that era could not have contemplated the challenges we face in today’s Global War on Terror.
Previously, terrorists exploited laws designed to protect Americans’ privacy and placed phone calls unnoticed to conspirators within our borders. Our intelligence officers could monitor a call between two foreign locations unhindered, but conversations beginning or ending on our soil required a court order. In today’s digital age, the time it takes to obtain these documents makes it impractical to intercept nearly instantaneous messages on cell phones and over the internet. And delays could mean the difference between life or death.
A recent news story in the New York Post is painfully illustrative. The Post reports that earlier this year, Al-Qaeda operatives ambushed seven of our soldiers on patrol in Iraq. Four were killed, and three were taken hostage. Our forces immediately began searching for the survivors, but were quickly halted by red tape. Because some of the terrorists’ cell phone calls were routed through U.S. networks, officers were forced to seek a court order to monitor their communications. Rescuers were delayed for almost ten hours while lawyers and judges decided whether or not they could search for their comrades. The trail went cold, our soldiers were executed and the terrorists escaped. As one observer aptly noted, “How many lawyers does it take to rescue our soldiers? It should be zero.”
The reforms of the Protect America Act give our law enforcement and intelligence officers new tools to prevent attacks against Americans. Appropriately, a court order is still required to listen in on purely domestic calls, between two people within our borders. But our intelligence community may now monitor phone calls originating outside our country, from Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, for instance, without time consuming court proceedings. Prior to these reforms, al-Qaeda leaders could have placed a call to a sleeper cell inside America without fear of detection. Today, our forces have the ability to intercept and monitor this call quickly and unencumbered.
The Protect America Act expires in February, and with it the new flexibility and effectiveness we have given our intelligence community. Rather than making these vital reforms permanent, some of my colleagues support legislation to impose more regulations that handicap our intelligence community. In addition, their initiatives do nothing to prevent frivolous lawsuits against telecommunications companies that cooperate with intelligence officials to aid in the War on Terror.
I pledge to work to defeat these dangerous measures in the Senate, so the intelligence community has the tools it needs and the privacy of law-abiding Americans is protected. Some of my colleagues use terms like “warrantless wiretaps” and “domestic surveillance” to score political points. In reality, as its title suggests, FISA applies strictly to foreign intelligence, and guarantees the proper judicial processes for purely domestic communications.
As our brave service members endeavor to protect us from terror attacks around the world, Congress must employ every possible means to protect our soldiers and cities from future deadly plots. We must ensure that those who sacrifice so much to defend our freedom have the knowledge and resources they need to carry out their mission.
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