Representative Heather Wilson: “in December of 2005, I was walking to work and was at 1st and C Street when the front page of the New York Times…”

“in December of 2005, I was walking to work and was at 1st and C Street when the front page of the New York Times revealed the existence of a program that had not been previously briefed to the entire Intelligence Committee and to the subcommittee that I, at that time, chaired that oversaw the activities of the National Security Agency. That launched a period of extensive oversight and draft legislation in 2006. In January of 2007, because legislation didn't pass, the administration made an attempt to put this entire program under a FISA law that was not designed and was not updated. I described that at the time as trying to put a twin-size sheet on a king-size bed. It didn't work. By late summer of 2007, we had lost close to two-thirds of our intelligence collection on terrorism. We were unable to respond fast enough when we had problems, particularly in war zones. Just before Memorial Day in 2007, we had three soldiers who were kidnapped in Iraq. We needed an Army of lawyers in Washington D.C. to listen to the communications of the people that we thought had kidnapped them. That delay is not good enough and led to the insistence that we pass the Protect America Act, which this Congress did, over the objections of the Democratic leadership, in August of 2007. The Protect America Act closed an important intelligence gap, but it expired in February of this year, and the gap is at risk of ever widening.”