Speaker Pelosi has refused to allow a vote on the bipartisan legislation, as we have discussed this decision has already weakened the ability of our intelligence agencies to protect your family from harm.
Bruce Berkowitz, of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, made an insightful point in a recent article in the Hoover Digest:
“One quirk of modern telecommunications is that a message from, say, Peshawar, Pakistan, to Beirut, Lebanon, might easily travel over a fiberoptic cable that passes through the United States…American law has always assumed that most domestic communications are protected by the Constitution, but that foreigners communicating abroad are not, and are fair game for U.S intelligence. Such intelligence is critical today to monitor terrorists and proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. The problem is that our laws were not designed for today’s technology. Until about 10 years ago most international communications traveled by satellite, and intelligence services could snatch them out of the air. Now this traffic is carried over a highly interconnected fiber-optic network. This network extends over most of the globe, but much of it is concentrated in the United States. Messages travel at the speed of light, so distance matters little. They use whichever path has available capacity; thus a lot of global traffic goes through links operated by American companies inside U.S. territory.â€
In other words, under the system that Speaker Pelosi deems adequate, almost every message in the world must be hidden from our intelligence agencies. If two people on the other side of the world call one another, yet their transmission is handled through American fiberoptic cables, then Nancy Pelosi wants our intelligence agencies to keep their hands off.
House Democrats are placing your family at greater risk, by refusing to allow a vote on the Protect America Act, which provides our intelligence agencies with critical tools and authorities for the 21st Century world.
