FISA Follies (CM)

Victoria Toensing, an FDD senior fellow, writing in today's Wall Street Journal:

FISA, written in 1978, is technologically antediluvian. It was drafted by legislators who had no concept of how terrorists could communicate in the 21st century or the technology that would be invented to intercept those communications. The rules regulating the acquisition of foreign intelligence communications were drafted when the targets to be monitored had one telephone number per residence and all the phones were plugged into the wall. Critics like Al Gore and especially critics in Congress, rather than carp, should address the gaps created by a law that governs peacetime communications-monitoring but does not address computers, cell phones or fiber optics in the midst of war.

The NSA undoubtedly has identified many foreign phone numbers associated with al Qaeda. If these numbers are monitored only from outside the U.S., as consistent with FISA requirements, the agency cannot determine with certainty the location of the persons who are calling them, including whether they are in the U.S. New technology enables the president, via NSA, to establish an early-warning system to alert us immediately when any person located in the U.S. places a call to, or receives a call from, one of the al Qaeda numbers. Do Mr. Gore and congressional critics want the NSA to be unable to locate a secret al Qaeda operative in the U.S.?

If we had used this ability before 9/11, as the vice president has noted, we could have detected the presence of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego, more than a year before they crashed AA Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

The rest of the op-ed is here.

Comments

[The Troll]

I would love to read the rest of this post, but I can't spare the expense to subscrbe to the Wall Street Journal. A sight thats as packed with as much good information as this one is should think about getting your information out. There is a large portion of america "grass roots" that don't have the budget to subscribe to all the mainstream papers and mags like Roll Call and the journal but we want the information. The large press and the niche periodicals haven't grasped why people gravitate to the internet to get their info. They are missing a lot of audience because they either cost to join or flood your e-mail with junk.

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