JIM ANGLE, FOX NEWS CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The director of national intelligence sent a letter to the House Intelligence Committee today calling for urgent and immediate action to fix a major roadblock in eavesdropping on terrorists; "We are significantly burdened in capturing overseas communication of foreign terrorists planning to conduct attacks inside the United States," he writes. "This situation is unacceptable in the current, heightened threat environment.

McConnell urged Congress to act without delay to fix the law known as FISA, a point he has made publicly to Congress for several months.

ADM MIKE MCCONNELL, DIRECTOR OF NATL INTELLIGENCE: Today's FISA requires judicial authorization to collect communications of non-U.S. persons, i.e. foreigners, located outside the United States. This clogs the FISA process with matters that have little to do with protecting civil liberties or privacy of persons in the United States.

REP. PETE HOEKSTRA (R), MICHIGAN: Foreign intelligence from foreign terrorists in foreign countries and we can't collect it....

REP. HEATHER WILSON (R), NEW MEXICO: This is putting Americans at risk. It means our intelligence agencies are having their fingers stuck in their ears and their hands over their eyes when terrorists are using the communications networks that we have built to plot and plan to kill Americans.

ANGLE: Some Democrats have minimized the problems as recently as this week....

'Special Report With Brit Hume,' July 26, 2007 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,291225,00.html

Another:

The U.S. homeland hasn't been struck by terrorists since September 11, and one reason may be more aggressive intelligence policies. So Americans should be alarmed that one of the best intelligence tools--warrantless wiretapping of al Qaeda suspects--has recently become far less effective and is in danger of being neutered by Congressional Democrats....

That's right: If an al Qaeda operative in Quetta calls a fellow jihadi in Peshawar, that call may well travel through a U.S. network. This ought to be a big U.S. advantage in our "asymmetrical" conflict with terrorists. But it also means that, for the purposes of FISA, a foreign call that is routed through U.S. networks becomes a domestic call. So thanks to the obligation to abide by an outdated FISA statute, U.S. intelligence is now struggling even to tap the communications of foreign-based terrorists. If this makes you furious, it gets worse.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010389

Senators Feinstein & Specter reintroduced their FISA bill on April 16 (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:S.1114:)

While foreign-to-foreign communications are not covered now by FISA's requirements, the NSA can only conduct surveillance on these calls if it can be sure, in advance, that a telephone call of email won't transit the United States or unexpectedly end here. In the age of cell phones and the global telecommunications system, this a priori certification is very difficult to make. This legislation therefore specifies that in such inadvertent collection cases, the NSA must minimize the data, but that it has not violated the law.

Of course, this bill doesn't include all the fun stuff (and more) that ondelette quoted from the bill the administration wants. Yeah, I'm furious, all right.

It's Saturday in India.

George Bush calls for easier wiretap rules

28 Jul 2007, 0415 hrs IST ,AFP

WASHINGTON: US President George W. Bush on Saturday called for Congress to revise a US security law in order to ease restrictions on the government's secret communications surveillance of terror suspects. Amid furor over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's handling of the government's secret warrantless wiretap program, Bush urged legislators to pass the update of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) proposed in April....

http://tinyurl.com/2v78qs