[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 10 (Wednesday, January 23, 2008)]
[House]
[Page H393]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    INTELLIGENCE GATHERING CRIPPLED

  (Mr. AKIN asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, February 1 is an extremely important date 
for us in terms of American security. You might wonder why that is, and 
that is because a law that we passed last summer is expiring and our 
intelligence agencies are going to be greatly crippled in their ability 
to make intelligence intercepts because of the change in the law.
  What has happened is the Democrats are trying to get us to go through 
a very complicated procedure with the FISA court to check on 
surveillance before we can actually make the wiretap. What the result 
is going to be is that it is going to make it very, very difficult to 
do these intercepts.
  Now we debated this at the end of last year, and we found that with 
the law that was being proposed, we wouldn't be able to arrest bin 
Laden even if we knew where he was going to be and what time he was 
going to be there. Since World War II, we have done these intercepts. 
We have intercepted Japanese and German wire transmissions.
  The bottom line is quite simply we are going to lose 60 percent of 
our intelligence gathering if this law is not fixed.

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