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Foxx votes to update U.S. foreign intelligence rules
Washington, DC,
August 4, 2007
Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (NC-5) today voted to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a law that governs the intelligence gathering abilities of the United States. The Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Micha
Contact: Aaron Groen
Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (NC-5) today voted to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a law that governs the intelligence gathering abilities of the United States. The Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Michael McConnell, informed Congress on multiple occasions that FISA needed to be updated in order to close a terrorist surveillance loophole which kept the U.S. from effectively gathering intelligence. “We finally have a sensible bill that gives the government the authority to track the communications of dangerous terrorist elements,” Foxx said. “It’s high time we updated the FISA laws so that our intelligence community can respond to constantly changing foreign terrorist information.” The strained and outdated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has prevented the intelligence community from acting with speed and agility to conduct necessary surveillance of foreign targets. Due to the outdated law, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been unable to monitor foreign terrorist communications that pass through communications infrastructure in the U.S.—even though these communications involve only foreign calls or e-mails. In an August 2 letter to Speaker Pelosi co-signed by Foxx and 189 Members of Congress she joined her colleagues in saying: “The Congressional Intelligence Committees and the House leadership have known about this problem since April of this year and yet, we are now approaching the August recess and still no action has been taken to fix the problem. Madam Speaker, our intelligence analysts are not able to connect the dots to keep us safe if they cannot collect the dots in the first place. This situation is unacceptable and places the American people at risk.” This legislation puts fixes in place that allow the U.S. to monitor foreign-to-foreign communications without a court order, even if those communications are routed through the United States. It will help clear what Admiral McConnell called a “huge backlog” of foreign intelligence that threatens U.S. security. ### |