IHT : Bush urges Congress to update eavesdropping rules before recess

Bush urges Congress to update eavesdropping rules before recess

The Associated Press | August 3, 2007

WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush said Friday that Congress should stay in session until it approved legislation modernizing a U.S. law governing eavesdropping on foreigners.

Bush has the authority under the Constitution to call Congress back into session once it has recessed or adjourned, but a White House spokeswoman, Dana Perrino, said talk of him doing that was premature.

"We cannot imagine that Congress would leave without fixing the problem," she said.

However, no deal was imminent.

"It's up in the air; I think we're going to be here for a while," Senator Charles Schumer of New York said upon emerging from a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats on the issue.

The Republican administration and the Democratic Congress are far from striking a deal on what the two parties agree needs to happen soon: an update of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

At issue is how the government could spy on foreign terror suspects overseas without invading Americans' privacy rights. Democrats want a special court that governs the implementation of the intelligence act to review eavesdropping to ensure surveillance does not focus on communications to and from Americans.

The law now generally requires court review of government surveillance of suspected terrorists in the United States. It does not specifically address the government's ability to intercept messages believed to come from suspects overseas, opening what the White House considers a significant gap in protecting against attacks by foreigners targeting the United States.

The urgent push to update the intelligence act may stem from a recent ruling by the court that oversees it. "There's been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States," the House Republican leader, John Boehner, said this week on Fox News.

The White House offered a compromise to the Democrats on Friday, saying it would agree to a court review of its foreign intelligence activities instead of leaving certification up to the attorney general and director of national intelligence. But it attached conditions: that the review be after the fact and involve only the administration's general process of collecting the intelligence, not individual cases, a senior administration official said on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations more freely.