[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 122 (Wednesday, September 19, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9468-S9469]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           HOW TO ADDRESS THE THREAT THAT CONFRONTS US TODAY

  Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I want to talk a little bit about the 
issue of how we as a government and how we as a people are going to 
address what is clearly a threat that confronts us today in the area of 
terrorism.
  Last week, the Commerce-State-Justice bill was on the floor, and a 
number of initiatives in the area of terrorism were included in that 
bill. I certainly thank the assistant leader for his strong support for 
that bill, for the elements which were in that bill, and his speaking 
on behalf of it at that time.
  Let me review, so we can put in perspective where we stand as a 
government, what we have been doing and what we need to do in a number 
of areas, certainly not a comprehensive review but at least a 
preliminary review of what has to be done.
  The Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and the Judiciary, on 
which I am the ranking member and Senator Hollings is chairman, has 
held innumerable hearings on this issue over the last 5 years in an 
effort to try to get our arms around what is obviously an issue that is 
extremely difficult to get our arms around. It seems a bit hollow now 
in light of what happened on September 11, but there was an attempt at 
least to try to put some order into our effort at the Federal level.
  Clearly, a dramatic amount still needs to be done, and the American 
people need to understand this is not going to be a simple exercise, an 
overnight exercise, or an exercise that can be completed in a week or a 
month or a year. Potentially it may take years before we as a nation 
are able to bring to the threat of terrorism some resolution which 
makes us more comfortable with our ability to manage it and deal with 
it, especially when there are individuals willing to kill themselves 
and take innocent lives in order to accomplish their goals.
  Let us begin with the basic threat and how we should address it. The 
issue of terrorism needs to be addressed on three basic levels. First 
is the intelligence level, both domestic and international. Second is 
the apprehension, the catching, of people before they commit the crime, 
before they undertake the act. People need to understand this is 
different from what is the traditional law enforcement exercise.
  In most law enforcement undertakings, we wait until the event occurs, 
until someone has committed an act which violates our laws, before we 
undertake to capture them or attempt to bring them to justice. In this 
instance, under the terrorism instance, the whole mindset must shift in 
the area of apprehension to one of taking action before the event 
occurs because, as we have seen, when the event occurs it is so 
horrific or can be so horrific that it simply cannot be accepted as a 
consequence of not having taken action.
  The third element is managing the crisis, managing the event. So it 
is intelligence, domestic/international; apprehension; and then, should 
an event occur, the managing of the event, both the immediate crisis 
and the aftermath, the consequences.
  In the area of intelligence, it is very clear we have some 
significant needs. We can divide these needs fairly easily into the 
needs that involve using people in the gathering of intelligence and 
the needs that involve technology.
  In the use-of-people area, we as a government in the 1990s, for a 
variety of reasons, basically decided we would no longer hire unsavory 
characters in order to get information. That was a mistake. It was 
known by a lot of people who were in the intelligence-gathering 
community to be a mistake when it was done. The decision to rely 
primarily on electronic surveillance and our capacity to use electronic 
surveillance as the main way of gathering information was a belief in a 
system that simply did not work, as has been proven to us. The 
penetration of small cells, which are for the most part clannish-
oriented, usually family groups, is extremely difficult. It is 
extremely difficult under any scenario, but it is virtually impossible 
if we do not use people who are not necessarily persons of high 
character by our definition.

  Therefore, we as a government made a decision, which was wrong, and 
we are trying to reverse it today. This Senate has actually spoken on 
this point in the bill and said the policy of the Government, which up 
until Tuesday, September 11, was not to hire such individuals for the 
purposes of on-the-ground intelligence, should no longer be pursued. 
The CIA and other agencies which have intelligence needs have the 
authority to proceed with using human intelligence and people they need 
to hire to accomplish that. That is exactly what we should be doing 
today.
  Unfortunately, and I think we have to understand this, it takes 
months, years, an inordinate amount of time to put these people in 
place. These individuals with whom we are working in order to gather 
the human intelligence have to gather their credibility within the 
organizations they are trying to penetrate, and it literally can take 
years before those people will become effective. We can not suddenly 
turn a switch and say we have switched directions and we will be 
successful in this area. We need to at least begin by turning the 
switch and saying we are going to switch directions and start using 
human intelligence-gathering activities again, as we did through most 
of the cold war.
  Second, in the electronics area it is very obvious that our 
intelligence-gathering communities, both domestic and foreign-oriented, 
whether they are CIA or FBI, have severe problems because of the 
limitations of law that have been placed on them in the area of 
intelligence-gathering capability and because of the way the commercial 
community works today. The bill that passed as a result of the 
amendment offered by Senator Hatch, Senator Kyl, and Senator Feinstein 
made some progress in this area in the area of wiretaps and the ability 
to, rather than focusing on the piece of equipment, focus on getting a 
court order that allows monitoring of the individual.
  But there is a great deal more that needs to be done, and I expect 
within the next day or so we will see a package of proposals sent up 
here by the Attorney General. I hope we will act quickly. That package 
has been represented to me to be a package which has what is needed and 
what can be done without undermining our constitutional protections of 
search and seizure and other rights we have. The simple fact is, we do 
need to act in this area.
  In addition, the area of encryption, time after time, for 4 years, we 
heard

[[Page S9469]]

in our committee was the single biggest concern the FBI had in its 
capacity to adequately monitor what was going on among the terrorist 
community, those people who wish to promote terrorism. In the area of 
encryption we need to have a new regime. We need to have the 
cooperation of the community that is building the software, producing 
the software, and building the equipment that creates the encryption 
technology.
  I have ideas how to do this so we do not undermine their activity to 
sell their product, and ideas that will allow us as a nation that wants 
to protect the civil rights of individuals and constitutional rights of 
individuals to do that, yet still allow our law enforcement community, 
when it sees a need, to be able to break a code. It allows the 
community to have the access to the keys to accomplish that under a 
strict structure which is legal and judicially controlled and therefore 
does not undermine the rights of the individuals who are producing this 
product or using the product but simply gets at the bad guys. I have a 
proposal to do that.

  More important, we have to recognize this is not a domestic problem. 
These products are made internationally. I believe we have the right to 
use the market of the United States as leverage for the purposes of 
accomplishing the protection of America. We have a huge economic market 
in the United States. The people making these products want to sell 
their products in the United States, whether it is this product or 
something else they make. I believe we should use the leverage of the 
American market as a way to say, if you are going to sell this type of 
equipment anywhere in the world, and you want to sell something in the 
United States also, you have an obligation to comply with our needs for 
our national security under a strict legal judicial structure.
  I am hopeful we can set up a regime that will be fair, that will be 
subject to the judicial controls necessary to protect the 
constitutional rights of people who are law-abiding but will also give 
our intelligence community the access to the information they need when 
they know there is somebody out there using encryption technology for 
the purposes of pursuing a terrorist act in the United States. There is 
no excuse for anybody to be underwriting that type of activity in our 
country. That is the intelligence level.
  The second level, as I mentioned, was the apprehension level. 
Apprehension is extremely difficult when you are dealing with the 
terrorist community. There is an entire law enforcement concept in this 
Nation that says we apprehend after the act occurs. Yet if we wait 
until after the act occurs in the area of terrorism, the harm is so 
extreme, as we saw in New York and in Washington, that it becomes very 
hard to justify allowing the event to occur before we have declared 
that the individual needs to be apprehended. We have to change our 
mindset and our approach, and in doing so we have to address our 
constitutional protections so you do not end up undermining that 
because it will make the terrorist successful.
  The simple fact is we are going to have to adjust our approach in the 
area of law enforcement to one of apprehending before the event 
approaches rather than after the event.
  Second, we are going to have to face the fact that our borders are 
incredibly porous and we have to set up a new regime for managing our 
borders which allows the proper flow of individuals back and forth so 
we can have the access that people, for example, from Mexico wish to 
have to work in the United States. But we also have to have controls so 
we know who is coming into our country.
  Again, I think the Guest Worker Program discussed and in the works is 
a way to address that. I have some thoughts in that area. This will be 
a key element of the United States of how we apprehend individuals who 
are bent on committing acts of terror in our Nation, getting control 
over our borders.
  The third element involved is crisis management and consequence 
management. Here the Federal Government needs to get its act under 
control. We have 46 agencies responsible for some element of terrorism 
or counterterrorism. There is tremendous overlap; that is, regrettably, 
turf issues. There is often indecision and lack of communication of 
information. In fact, in the instance we had in New York, there may 
have been a specific lack of communication of information. We need a 
centralized management structure within our Federal Government.
  We have proposed in the Commerce-State-Justice bill it be divided for 
the purposes of domestic terrorist acts--no military but domestic 
terrorist acts--into two areas. In the Justice Department, appointment 
of a Deputy Attorney General of Terrorism, with a cross-jurisdiction 
responsibility. Unless you have budget authority for this individual, 
there is no point in having such an individual.
  The Justice Department for crisis management, the Federal Emergency 
Management Administration for consequence administration, they would 
essentially be coordinators of the issue of how we handle domestic 
terrorist events here in the United States. They would function as 
coequals, and would be sequential, however, in their response to an 
event.
  This is just one proposal for how to do it. It is one that passed 
this Senate and has been strongly supported, for example, by the 
assistant leader, Senator Reid. I thank Senator Hollings for his 
support and Senator Warner and Senator Shelby, who participated in the 
hearings.
  As I mentioned, this is just one approach to accomplishing this goal, 
but we need to accomplish this goal, and we need to accomplish it 
quickly. The key to accomplishing it, as I mentioned, is whoever is 
given the responsibility for managing the terrorist portfolio, that 
individual also has to have budgetary responsibility across 
departmental lines because the only way you control things in this 
Government is if you control the dollars. If you do not control the 
dollars, you are not going to be able to control the activity. With the 
drug czar, we saw a complete failure of just naming someone to a 
position and claiming he has responsibility when he never got the 
authority to do the job. We cannot afford that on the issue of 
terrorism.
  This cannot be a public relations event. This must be an individual 
who has significant power and the responsibility and the capacity to 
carry out that responsibility because he has the power to do it.
  My time has run out. I know there are other people who want to speak 
so I will yield the floor, but I do intend to speak further on this 
issue of how we manage our house on the issue of terrorism. There is a 
lot we need to do and a great deal that needs to be thought about in 
this area.
  I especially thank the Senator from North Dakota for his courtesy.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. SPECTER. I thank the Chair. (The remarks of Mr. Specter 
pertaining to the introduction of S. 1434 are located in today's Record 
under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Colorado.
  Mr. ALLARD. Madam President, I request 10 minutes in morning 
business.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

                          ____________________