Conyers:Terrorist Surveillance Without Compromising Personal Liberties

Late Thursday night, the House passed the RESTORE Act, a bill that addresses the issue of warrantless surveillance and resolves outstanding issues that resulted from the stopgap measure passed in August.

We have drafted a law that will allow us to provide for the safety our citizens without asking them the sacrifice their personal rights and liberties. In rewriting this summer's Protect America Act, we reaffirmed and strengthened the role of the FISA courts ensuring that court approval must be sought for conducting this type of surveillance.

Our bill also did not provide any retroactive immunity for telecommunications carriers. The administration had asked us to provide blanket immunity for the phone companies participating in the warrantless surveillance program, yet there is no way we could even consider this request without an understanding of the full scope of the program. How can we be expected to approve of their conduct when we don't know what their conduct was?

For this reason, we requested the underlying documentation that would reveal to the Committee the nature and extent of the telephone companies' participation in this program. The administration has refused to provide us these documents for the past ten months and we had no choice but dismiss their request for immunity.

Nonetheless, the bill we passed this week provides all the tools needed by the government to fight terrorism and we are pleased that the Senate is moving in our same direction on this legislation.

http://johnconyers.com/node/173