Heather Wilson

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. 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.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. 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.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. 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.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. 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.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. 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?

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. 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.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. 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.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. I thank the gentleman for having this hour tonight.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. 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.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. One of the ironies here is that some of our colleagues on the Intelligence Committee who were worried about this new law said well, can you tell us how often you collect information that is to, from, or about Americans in the normal intelligence collection? Well, that would require the intelligence agencies to go back and mine their databases, much of which, frankly, is not even touched and actually probably violate the privacy of Americans in ways that they do not now do so in order to make a report to the Congress about collection of information that happened to be incidentally about Americans. If the North Koreans called the, pick one, Iranians and are talking about one of our colleagues in the Congress, that's a conversation about an American.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. But if the gentleman will yield, it's even worse than that. If the limitation in law said you can only listen to foreign-to-foreign communications and I am trying to listen to your cell phone, how do I know who you are going to call next before you call me? So if you are a foreigner and you call another foreigner, that's fine. But if you call into the United States, I have committed a felony because you just called the United States. You cannot possibly technically, with very rare exceptions, be able to screen out all communications that a foreign target might do calling into the United States before the communication takes place.

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

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Michigan, and I think it's important tonight to take a moment to stop for a moment. We've been talking all day and all afternoon about health care, and it is something we both care about, and jobs and education and trying to make our schools better and make sure we have roads that people can drive to work on and that we can build businesses and get products to market. And we're all focused on our lives and trying to raise our kids and do the best we can, but we want to talk about something tonight that's really a serious issue and is something I think worries all of us. But sometimes we just want to set it aside, and we don't want to think about things that could happen to our own families, particularly if we don't feel personally like we can do something about it. But as government leaders there are things that we can do about it. In fact, I think we have a duty. The first duty that we have as Federal officials is to make sure we protect this country. This weekend, I have been a merit badge adviser for citizenship in the Nation in Troop 166 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had a group of boys that I was just teaching about the Constitution. We were talking about what are the functions of the Federal Government. And I believe that first and foremost our duty is to provide for the common defense. And by that, we don't mean to clean up after the next disaster or support law enforcement if they prosecute people who conducted a terrorist attack. That's not enough, and that shouldn't be the goal of our government. It is to prevent a terrorist attack on this country. It's to prevent the next disaster. It's to prevent you waking up tomorrow morning, as you did 6 years ago, to watch aircraft fly into the sides of buildings. I think in some ways maybe as a people our desire to move on with our lives has caused us to become a little complacent about the threats that we continue to face; and, in fact, I think our greatest accomplishment in the last 6 years has been what has not happened. We have not had another terrorist attack on our soil since that cool September morning, and it's not because they haven't tried. A year ago in August, the British Government arrested 16 people who were within 48 hours of walking on to American airliners at Heathrow Airport and blowing them up simultaneously over the Atlantic. They planned to conceal explosives in things they could carry on in their luggage that looked like toothpaste or hair cream or shampoo, things you'd normally have. That's why all of us now have to put those things in those little quart-size containers so they can make sure there's not enough of anything there that can destroy an airliner, because the people in Heathrow were going to do that. They were going to make the bomb on board. And if we underestimate the hatred and the cruelty of the people that were going to carry this out, think about this: one of them told the police at Heathrow or British police that he intended to bring his wife and his 6-month-old child with him so he wouldn't attract too much suspicion at the airport. Think about that for a second. These people hate Americans so much, they are so determined to inflict mass casualties on us, that they're willing to kill their own 6-month-old child to do it. That's the threat that we continue to face; and on September 6, in this month, in Germany, they arrested three people who had amassed enough explosive material to cause an explosion larger than the London subway bombs. Their likely targets were U.S. military bases in Germany. Al Qaeda has been successful in the past in conducting a dramatic attack on the United States with mass casualties, huge economic dislocation; and they want to do it again. As Americans we have to accept, perhaps not accept but expect, that it is likely that they will succeed. They may fail in more of their attempts than they succeed at, but they only have to succeed once. America has to get it right 100 percent of the time. They can fail a bunch of times. They just have to get it right once. There's no question in my mind anyway, and in fact bin Laden has said so, they are trying to acquire chemical, biological, and nuclear materials in order to make their attacks on the West even more dramatic, more devastating, more catastrophic. And there is no doubt in my mind that if they had those weapons they would use them.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. And one of the things that's so deeply troubling is they don't even need to get a nuclear weapon to sell terror across a whole region. It is just nuclear material or a suitcase-sized device that could cause tremendous damage and mass casualties, huge economic dislocation; and that is their intent. And sometimes you listen to these tapes from bin Laden, and I was sitting in my office reading over the most recent one that he sent out on 9/11 on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks. You read through this and go, man, this guy is nuts. It just sounds nuts, but he is serious, and he has shown the ability to carry out mass attacks in the United States and to inspire followers to try to do the same. We have to take this threat seriously. So the question is, as a Nation, and this is one of the things I look forward to talking a little bit about with my colleague tonight, all right, if the first duty of the United States Government is to protect America, to protect Americans from all enemies foreign and domestic, so how do we do this? How can we not only be better today than we were 6 years ago on the morning of 9/11? That's not the challenge. How do we be better tomorrow than we are today? I think the greatest accomplishment we've had over the last 6 years is that we've not had another terrorist attack on our soil; but just because we're one step ahead of them today is not good enough. We have to stay one step ahead of them. How do we make sure our government is doing everything it can to keep America safe?

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. One of the things that is hard to understand is just how difficult prevention is when you're facing a terrorist threat compared to what we faced during the Cold War. I served in the military during the Cold War. I served overseas in Europe for most of my time as an officer, graduated from the Air Force Academy and then did my service overseas. In some ways I kind of look back on this and say as an intelligence problem, the Soviet Union was a very convenient enemy. They had their exercises the same time every year. They came out of the same barracks. They had tables of equipment and standard organizational charts. They used the same radio frequencies, the same rail lines. They were a very predictable, potential enemy. Had they ever attacked us, they would have been very difficult to defeat, but we had no doubt about where they were and what they were doing pretty much, and we had huge systems set up for what we called indications and warning, ballistic missile early warning systems and systems that would launch our air interceptors if bombers came close to the United States. We were very good at looking at what the Soviet Union was doing to immediately protect America.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. The intelligence problem with terrorism is much different. It is more like a Where's Waldo problem. They are hiding among us. They don't have set tables of equipment, they don't have their own dedicated radio systems. They don't live in barracks. They don't have exercises that we can catch or plan for or listen to. But if we can find them, we can stop them. And that is why I believe that good intelligence is the first line of defense on the war on terror.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. My colleague from Michigan and I are talking tonight about something that is pretty important and something perhaps that gets not enough time or attention these days, and that is, how do we better prevent a successful attack on the United States, a successful terrorist attack in particular? One of our strongest tools in this fight is good intelligence. Now, America spies on its enemies.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. That is exactly what we do. Other governments try to hide what they are doing and terrorist organizations try to hide what they are doing, and we try to steal those secrets. That is what good intelligence does. We steal those secrets so that we can find out the plans and the capabilities and the intentions of groups that might want to kill us or attack us so that we can stop them.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. Sure.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. And probably one of the best ways that we have to get a handle, particularly on the terrorist threats, is what they call communications intelligence. We try to listen to people talking to each other. If you are trying to get people's plans and their intentions, understand more about them, you listen to them when they are talking to each other. That is what communications intelligence does. And we have been trying to collect communications intelligence since we started technical intelligence since the invention of the telegraph. There were spies during the Civil War. We tried to read communications telegrams, intercept international telegrams during the First World War. So we have been trying to intercept communications to be able to tell what is the enemy going to do. In New Mexico, probably the best example and the one that people know today is what we tried to do to protect our own communications. Particularly in the Pacific, in the Marine Corps, because we knew the Japanese were listening to our guys in the field talk to each other on the radios back and forth on where they were going and what hill they were going to, what their plans were. They used Navajo communicators because nobody in Japan could translate the Navajo code talkers. So we try to protect our own communications. We also try to intercept those of the enemy, both on the battlefield and more globally. One of the challenges that we face and one of the things that the gentleman from Michigan and I have been working on for close to 2 years is that our laws for communications, particularly for gathering foreign intelligence from within the United States, have become outdated. There is a law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which was initially put in place in 1978. Before that, there was really no statute that dealt with any limitations at all on how you collect foreign intelligence, foreign communications intelligence if you are based here in the United States. That law was a response to excesses of the intelligence community in the 1950s and the 1960s, and Congress put some limitations in place. They said, we are going to have some procedures on how we gather foreign intelligence in the United States. Now, think about this. 1978. 1978 was the year I graduated from high school. The telephone was on the wall in the kitchen and it had an extra long extension cord. The Internet was not a word in the dictionary. Cell phones were only on Star Trek, and the first personal computer, the first IBM personal computer was invented in 1982, so 4 years after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was put in place. So the threat was different. We were looking at collecting foreign intelligence mostly on diplomats who were hiding as spies in embassies like the Soviet embassy here in Washington. So it was a more static enemy and more static communications. In 1978, almost all long-haul communication went over the air; it was bounced off satellites. Almost all short-haul communication, local calls, were over a wire. When we wrote the law, or when the Congress wrote the law in 1978, it was technology specific. It said, you don't have to do anything special if you are just gathering signals over the air if it is a radio signal or satellite signal. You can tune it in on your tuner similar to your car radio. There is no special privacy protections there. But if you touch a wire, you have to do some special things. So it was technology specific. Since 1978, we have gone through a revolution in communications technology so that now the situation is completely reversed. Now, almost all long-haul communications that would be of foreign intelligence interest are on a wire; and almost all, or a vast percentage, of short-haul communications are over the air. There are 230 million cell phone customers just in the United States. This change in technology meant that the foreign intelligence surveillance law was getting more and more out of date, at the same time the threats to the United States were changing, requiring America to be more agile in its intelligence collection than we had to be when faced with the former Soviet Union and the Soviet threats. I yield back to my colleague from Michigan.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. And one of the ironies here is that because of this law, if we're trying to listen to a foreigner in a foreign country, and we take tremendous risks with our members of the intelligence community and collect that communication overseas, maybe at high risk, may not work, and we collect that communication overseas, you don't have to ask permission from anybody in the American judiciary. You're out there trying to do your job as a military officer or a civilian in the intelligence agencies, trying to steal secrets, listen to communications overseas. But America dominates telecommunications. It used to be that if somebody from northern Spain was calling southern Spain, the route of that communication went directly from northern Spain to southern Spain. Now, because of global telecommunications networks, that call will go on the least restrictive, fastest path. And these efficiencies are running all of the time, and that call from northern Spain to southern Spain could route all the way around the world, through the United States, through whatever the system figures is the best, fastest path. So we may have situations where somebody in a foreign country is talking to somebody else in the same foreign country, and the communication might be routed through the United States. And yet just because you touch, when you touch a wire in the United States, under the old law, you had to get a warrant from a court, even if you're listening to a foreigner in a foreign country, even if there are U.S. military forces in that country hunting down insurgents who are trying to kill Americans. It just doesn't make any sense at all. And as one military officer said recently in Iraq, this doesn't make any sense. If I see an insurgent on the telephone, I can shoot him, but I can't listen to him. That was the problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that we sought to get fixed.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. The other irony of this is that it depended on what technology they were using to talk to each other. If the terrorists or insurgents trying to kill your military unit in the mountains of Afghanistan were using push-to-talk radios, you could listen to them. But if they were on a wire line phone and you were listening, trying to tap into that communication, if it transited the United States, you needed a warrant from somebody in Washington, D.C. This makes no sense. And it was compromising our ability to protect this country, and it was putting our soldiers in danger overseas. Now there's one provision I want to talk about because I think it is sometimes misrepresented and given as an excuse for not making any updates to the law, and that's the emergency provision in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In the 1978 law, there was an emergency provision that said, in case of an emergency, the Attorney General can stand in the shoes of the FISA Court and can approve wiretapping in the United States, and then get 72 hours to go in front of the court and make their case and get the warrant. The problem is that the Attorney General really does stand in the shoes of the court. The Director of National Intelligence has testified in open session that an average FISA warrant takes 200 man-hours to complete the packet, which is about two or three inches thick, to show probable cause in order to get a warrant. But it's worse than that. If we're talking in the United States, there are things that you can do. If I think that my colleague from Michigan is affiliated with a terrorist organization, the FBI can go out and talk to his neighbors. We can show what kind of affiliations he has with others, who he's communicating with us and so on. But if you're on the Horn of Africa and you think a particular guy is affiliated with al Qaeda, it's not as though you have a lot of resources there to build your case for probable cause to satisfy some judge in Washington, D.C. And so the standard was not even being met in some cases where we had very good reason to believe that someone was affiliated with a terrorist organization. But everybody, all our analysts are back here, with the limited number of analysts we have with expertise in particular terrorist cells, trying to develop cases to convince judges to allow wiretaps on foreigners in foreign countries simply because the point of access to the communication was in the United States. And the emergency provision really requires the Attorney General to stand in the shoes of the judge. He has to certify that the probable cause standard is met, that it's all the work to get to that probable cause standard that takes the time in the first place. And in the real world the time has taken too long in cases of real emergencies.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. And some of my colleagues have said, well, you know, there are some commonsense cases, I mean, where you should just, you know, we're all reasonable people here. There's some commonsense situations where if you've got insurgents who've captured American soldiers, gee, start listening to their communications and we'll take care of the paper work later. That's a felony under the old foreign intelligence surveillance law. So who in a bureaucracy is willing to commit a felony on the hope that some judge will give them mercy? And I look at this and I think, this is nuts. It is the United States Congress' responsibility to make sure we have the laws in place so that the people who are trying to protect us can prevent the next terrorist attack. We shouldn't have lawyers in Washington going in front of judges or making late-night calls to the Attorney General with somebody overseas on the line trying to explain why Abu terrorist really is an agent of a foreign power.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. It used to be a felony until we fixed it.

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. 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.