Representative Heather Wilson: “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…”

“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.”