Political Quotes

“it is my desire to bring this focus back to the issue at hand and bring something of a commonsense approach to this. We are trying to modernize the FISA Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Since 1978, there has been a technology revolution in communications: the Internet, cell phones, laptops, desktops for under $500, immediate, rapid, global, affordable communications on demand, satellite phones, GPS for $99. The bottom line is the terrorists can communicate, conspire, organize, recruit and train on a global basis from any spider hole, cave or clubhouse anywhere in the world. We have to modernize the legislation that allows our intelligence agencies and our law enforcement officials to track down those bad guys, not after they have blown up the World Trade Center or after they have flown a plane into the Pentagon, but before they do those things. In other words, a September 12th mentality, as opposed to a September 10th mentality, the idea that we have to recommit ourselves to the notion that we are very much at war and that we are very much in grave danger by these radicals who have at their disposal all the tools that modern technology can provide and we are arming our law enforcement officials with 25-year-old authority. To change that, to bring us out of the copper wire telephone world into the wireless, cellular satellite world, we have to pass this legislation.”