Russ Feingold: “Responding to the comments just made, the Senator from Missouri, in responding to the Feingold-Webb-Tester amendment…”

“Responding to the comments just made, the Senator from Missouri, in responding to the Feingold-Webb-Tester amendment, tried to indicate that this will prevent us from going after spies and others from foreign states. First, under our amendment, of course the FISA Court can grant permission to wiretap spies. And, if it is a foreign state that is involved in terrorism, there would be no permission required under our amendment to wiretap the officials involved. It would not affect that. It was also suggested this would somehow be very cumbersome. That suggests we are requiring permission for all foreign communications, but that is not true. Our amendment only affects, and only in a minimal way, communications from a foreign place to someone in the United States. That is not cumbersome. Third, the Senator from Missouri suggests we will have to make the Government sift through all kinds of e-mails to figure out whether they can get at individual communications. That is the opposite of the way this works. This amendment creates an assumption in favor of collection. In other words, if the Government does not know for sure if a communication is foreign or domestic, the assumption is it is foreign until there is some indication that it is domestic. It is only then that the limited oversight provided by this amendment kicks in. The final example the Senator from Missouri used shows how questionable these arguments are.”