The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president's authority only against al Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes.
While Congress saw some need to loosen the standard in the initial days of a war, it wanted the president to comply with FISA in carrying out surveillance in the United States.
If we are going to conduct espionage in the future, we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves.
In the last four years under the Patriot Act, we have seen a great increase in the ability of law enforcement officials to investigate and track terrorists.
We should go forward in courts and Congress with investigations into post-9/11 interrogations and the decisions leading to them.
I was a federal prosecutor when we exercised powers under the Patriot Act or under the FISA court.
There's been intelligence that terrorists would look to programs such as the visa waiver program to exploit.
In the aftermath of September 11, and as the 9/11 Commission report so aptly demonstrates, it is clear that our intelligence system is not working the way that it should.
The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities in American history... The real problem is that they're using these capabilities to make us vulnerable.
We cannot go up on a wire. We cannot do a search without a judge on the FISA Court approving it and determining that we have met the standard that has been set forth by Congress in order to utilize these techniques.