Representative Heather Wilson: “I became absolutely determined to get this fixed, and it was a result of a series of cases in what I saw as a growing…”

“I became absolutely determined to get this fixed, and it was a result of a series of cases in what I saw as a growing problem in intelligence collection. But so that people understand, in 1978 the Congress passed a law that governed intelligence collection here in the United States, and it was in response to a bunch of abuses that happened in the 1950s and the 1960s. Someone gave me a copy of a declassified memorandum signed by Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover authorizing the wiretapping of Martin Luther King. Intelligence agencies were involved in abuses and violating the civil liberties of Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, and this law in 1978 set up a special court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They meet in secret session. But in order to listen and to do a wiretap for the collection of foreign intelligence in the United States, you need to get a warrant from this court. The problem is that the law was written specific to the technology of the time.”