Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It's an honor to testify about the FISA problem.

The controversial programs of surveillance by the National Security Agency, outside the framework of FISA, I think, can only be resolved by having congressional regularization of these programs. And I submitted very brief testimony, and I'll just paraphrase what I said.

I do believe FISA is obsolete as a weapon for dealing with international terrorism. And the reason for that is precisely that it's tied to the idea of warrants. To get a warrant, you have to know that the person whose communications you want to intercept is an enemy of the United States, basically. You have to have strong suspicion of that.

And that, of course, enables the NSA, within the FISA framework, to monitor known terrorists or suspected terrorists. But the real need is to find out who the terrorists are. Are there terrorist cells in the United States that we're unaware of?

We know there is a large Muslim population in the United States. There's a large Muslim population in Canada, within a few miles of the United States. We have open borders, essentially. We have millions of people coming to the United States from all over the world.

So the possibility of domestic terrorism remains, I think, very acute. And so we have to find out who the terrorists, their supporters and their accomplices are. And you cannot do that with a warrant system. Warrants are designed for a situation in which a crime has been committed and a focused investigation is possible and it leads to suspects, and when you have enough suspicion, you can monitor them. You can search their houses. You can listen to their phone calls and so on.

That is not the -- the challenge for intelligence is not to track down known terrorists. It's to find out who the terrorists are. As I say, the warrant will not do that. Speeding up the warrant process is an excellent idea, but it will not deal with the types of investigation that have to be freed from a warrant requirement, because the essential requirement of the warrant, of knowing that the person you want to listen to is someone who's probably an enemy of the United States, that's too stringent a requirement.

At the same time, when surveillance is cut loose from suspicion of individuals, there is a legitimate concern with civil liberties and privacy problems. What the program, as far as I, as an outsider, can judge it, involves is computer screening of a vast number of communications to try to identify a relative handful that seem suspicious, sufficiently suspicious that you want a human intelligence officer to listen to the conversation or read the e-mail.

At that point, when a human intelligence officer is reading a private communication, there is a privacy concern, a civil liberties concern. And so the challenge for Congress is to formulate controls that will prevent abuses of this process without paralyzing the nation's ability to find out about terrorist activities that may be going on in the United States, conducted by people whom we don't know, and therefore cannot get a warrant to investigate.

And what I've suggested in my testimony and summary very, very briefly is a series of controls, unrelated to warrants, that will, I think, protect the legitimate concerns of civil liberties and privacy that have been raised.

So one suggestion I have is to create a steering committee for national security electronic surveillance, (those of ?) the attorney general, the director of National Intelligence, the secretary of Homeland Security, and a senior or a retired federal judge or justice. And this committee would be responsible for monitoring these surveillance programs to make sure they comply with the Constitution and with the laws.

I would require the National Security Agency to submit to the FISA court, to this committee and the corresponding committee in the Senate, to the steering committee, some other responsible body or bodies, a list of the names and other identifying information of everybody whose communications have been read under these programs, and with a brief statement why these individuals had been targeted, what had triggered in the computer search programs a need to read this particular communication, and what was the result of the interception.

In addition to this, I think it would be -- to limit the scope of these programs, it would be important for Congress to make clear in amending legislation that this kind of surveillance is limited to national security, narrowly defined. You don't want national security defined so broadly that ordinary criminals are regarded as threats to national security.

And you want to particularly stress, information obtained in these interceptions should be usable only for national security purposes. Whenever you have massive screening of communications, you're going to have false positives. You're going to have an intelligence officer who reads the communication which the computer has signaled as possibly suspicious, read the communication, discover this person is not a terrorist, terrorist accomplice or anything of that sort.

What you might discover is it's a private communication, that this person is not paying his child support orders or he's not paying his taxes or he's not paying Social Security tax for his children's nanny, and so on. And I think you should forbid the use of that kind of information, information extraneous to national security, for any purpose by the government.

And that will, I think, allay the public's concern that you have intelligence officers trolling through private communications, there's a lot of wild talk and indiscreet talk in these communications, that it will not be used against them.

I think it'd be appropriate to have this kind of authorization for this kind of surveillance to sunset after five years, something of that sort, so it doesn't become a permanent part of American law, perhaps long after the terrorist threat abates. We don't know when that will be.

We should have strict punishments for intelligence officers who violate the law or who in particular make disclosures of information, you know, for improper reasons, unauthorized reasons.

We should also, I think -- I think Congress should also bar lawsuits challenging the legality of the current program. I think there should be a fresh start, not perpetuate the disputes over the existing program, but bring it within statutory authorization and then forget about the past.

But the controls I've proposed, I think, would give Congress adequate oversight authority and it would place the officials in the executive branch who administer the surveillance programs, conduct them under stringent limitations that would prevent abuses, without falling into the trap of thinking that we can conduct adequate surveillance, protect national security within the framework of a warrant-based system.

Thank you.