Director of National Intel McConnell: Private Firms Need Liability Protection

[sabra]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/14/AR2008021403103.html

A Key Gap In Fighting Terrorism
Private Firms Need Liability Protection

By Mike McConnell
Friday, February 15, 2008; Page A21


One of the most critical weapons in the fight against terrorists and other foreign intelligence threats -- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- has not kept up with the technology revolution we have experienced over the past 30 years. We are on the brink of bringing this 20th-century tool in line with 21st-century technology and threats. The Senate has passed a strong bill, by an overwhelmingly bipartisan margin, that would modernize FISA and do the right thing for those companies that responded to their country's call for assistance in its hour of need. It would also protect the civil liberties we Americans cherish. The bill is now before the House of Representatives.

For almost two years, we have worked with Congress to modernize FISA and ensure that the intelligence community can effectively collect the information needed to protect our country from attack -- a goal that requires the willing cooperation of the private sector. Unfortunately, there were significant gaps in our ability to collect intelligence on terrorists and other national security threats because the 1978 law had not been modernized to reflect today's global communications technology.

The Protect America Act, passed by Congress last August, temporarily closed the gaps in our intelligence collection, but there was a glaring omission: liability protection for those private-sector firms that helped defend the nation after the Sept. 11 attacks. This month, I testified before Congress, along with the other senior leaders of the intelligence community, on the continuing threats to the United States from terrorists and other foreign intelligence targets. We stated that long-term legislation that modernized FISA and provided retroactive liability protection was vital to our operations. The director of the FBI told the Senate that "in protecting the homeland it's absolutely essential" to have the support of private parties.

This is not news. Senior intelligence leaders have repeatedly testified that providing retroactive liability protection is critical to carrying out our mission. We are experiencing significant difficulties in working with the private sector today because of the continued failure to address this issue. As we noted before the House, if we do not address liability protection we "believe it will severely degrade the capabilities of our Intelligence Community to carry out its core missions of providing warning and protecting the country."

:puke:

[JDPriestly]

1. Nonsense!!!

Bush had a Republican majority in Congress while the telecoms were illegally eavesdropping on our electronic communications. Had he wanted to change the laws to make their conduct legal, he would have met absolutely no opposition. In fact, the now Democratic majority is kowtowing to his megalomaniac need to see and know everything that is going on in our minds and hearts.

Why didn't Bush simply go to Congress and get the permission to involve those private companies in his illegal eavesdropping scheme right after 9/11? Because he wanted to sneak his snooping. That's why. And there is the rub. It isn't really that anyone needed the information they were getting. Had they really needed it, they would have simply gone to Congress and quietly obtained permission to get the information. What they really wanted was to snoop on our private lives unbeknownst to us -- and that is what is fundamentally wrong about it -- the sneakiness.

The Bush administration finds such joy in acting outside the law. This is a characteristic of people who are criminal by nature. In my experience, most Americans respect the law and seek sincerely to obey it to the extent that they are capable. But Bush and his buddies seem to hate the rule of law. Their sneaky snooping was wrong in and of itself. But what it tells about their disrespect for the law is detestable, even frightening. I have met a few petty criminals in the course of my work in my day (not friends or family), and most of them had more respect for the law than Bush and his buddies. How sad and shameful that the good law-abiding citizens of the United States were fooled by these gangsters.