MR. STANZEL: Because it's -- in 1978, as we talked about, during that period, in 1978, the law, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was passed, and that law was designed to help us gain intelligence on foreign targets in foreign lands. What we're not wanting to do here is to extend constitutional protections to terrorists in foreign countries.

So it's important that this law was modernized. It was modernized in August. As we talked about then, that the law was significantly outdated. You could have sat in that chair in 1978 and not had the ability to make a phone call from a cell phone; today you can. Today, you can send an e-mail from anywhere in the world via a Blackberry. The law was outdated, so it needed to be improved. It was improved. But Congress set a deadline for it to expire so they could review it some more and that -- they missed that deadline. We gave them a 15-day extension.

The Senate used that time to pass a bipartisan bill that received over two-thirds support from the United States Senate, has a majority of support in the United States House. But the House leadership, which seems to be beholden to class-action trial attorneys in this matter, refused to let it come up for a vote. So they are more interested in protecting the interests of one of their constituencies than in protecting the interests of Americans.

seen at 09:31, 15 February in Whitehouse Press Briefings. Email this to a friend.
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