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ask.heather@mail.house.gov

In Washington DC
442 Cannon House
Office Building
Washington, DC
20515
202-225-6316 Phone
202-225-4975 Fax
In Albuquerque
20 First Plaza NW
Suite 603
Albuquerque, NM
87102
505-346-6781 Phone
505-346-6723 Fax

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Congresswoman Heather Wilson, First Congressional District of New Mexico


Postcard
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Intelligence Authorization May 16, 2007
 
Click to Read: Democrats Accept Status Quo on Eavesdropping

Dear Friends,

Over the last two months we have been working on the intelligence authorization bill.

Each of our 16 intelligence agencies have come to our secure meeting room in the Capitol to talk about their plans, programs and budgets.

One of the things I like about the Intel Committee is that there is no "C-SPAN effect". There are no cameras or reporters and things are pretty serious. It`s also a small committee and member driven. You can make an important difference there.

We made some big decisions this year and last year on some of the technical programs so important to gathering intelligence. It took some amendments and negotiations to get there, but the results on technical programs will help minimize risk for the country.

But there are other areas that didn`t get fixed and the bill overall starts taking us in a troubling direction.

The bill had significant reductions in some special human intelligence programs. In the 1990`s we devastated our human intelligence programs -- the difficult and often dangerous work of recruiting spies. We closed overseas stations and lost spy networks that might have alerted us to the terror threat that attacked us on 9/11. We should not go back to those days.

And the bill ignores the biggest policy challenge the Congress must address: modernizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Every member of the Intelligence Committee knows that there is a serious problem with the law that needs to be fixed. I can`t in good conscience support the status quo and pretend that the problem isn`t there.

The piece of the Intelligence bill that got the most attention was directing the Intelligence Community to do a National Intelligence Estimate on the impact of global warming.

To be sure, weather and climate can affect our national security interests. Drought and famine destabilized Somalia. The Tsunami devasted economies in Asia. But on climate change, there is an alphabet soup of federal agencies that are much better suited to this work -- NOAA, NASA, DOE, EPA, NSF, to rattle off a few.

The experts on climate change and its potential impacts are not in the intelligence community. While this provision is easy to criticize, the human intelligence reductions and the failure to fix FISA are the more serious failings of the bill.

Wish you were here,

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