Feinstein backs new phone rules
When the Senate meets this weekend in a rare Sunday session, Sen. Dianne Feinstein will be there to vote to allow the government to have continued — though limited — access to Americans’ phone records.
Speaking Thursday night at a Stanford University event on national security, the former San Francisco mayor said that allowing that controversial section of the Patriot Act to expire at 12: 01 a. m. Monday would cre- ate “chinks in our armor” against terrorism.
“These programs aim to protect our country, pure and simple,” she said.
The talk, part of a series on the ongoing concern about government secrecy a democratic society, featured a one- on- one conversation between Feinstein and Philip Taubman, a consulting professor at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and former Washington bureau chief for the New York Times.
For Feinstein, who was chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 2009 until Republicans took control of the Senate in 2014, the real threat of terrorism in the world, especially as seen in the growing international threat of the Islamic State, is reason enough for her to back the revised telephone surveillance rules supported by President Obama.
The Islamic group, which is estimated to control one- third of both Syria and Iraq is, “in my view, the personification of evil,” the senator said, talking about seeing videos of children beheaded and hundreds of captured soldiers mowed down by machine gun fire.
“I don’t think that during my lifetime I’ve ever seen such evil exist in the world,” she said.
But Feinstein knows that Obama’s proposed revision, which would leave telephone records in the hands of the telecommunication companies rather than the government, faces tough sledding in the Senate. While the so- called USA Freedom Act passed the House on a 338- 88 vote this month, it fell three votes short of the 60 needed to force a straight up-or-down majority vote.
Feinstein said she is confident that the bill’s supporters will find those three votes, unless opponents like Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul lard the bill with unacceptable amendments.
The concerns about government secrecy and overreach are understandable, said Feinstein, who worked last year to make public a 500- page summary of a report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s “black ops” detention and interrogation/ torture of terrorism suspects taken into custody following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“It was a terrible miscarriage of justice” that didn’t yield usable intelligence, she said. “It’s a very important standard to be able to say, ‘ Never again. This is not what the United States of America is about.’ ”
But concerns about what might happen can’t stop the country from seeking reliable intelligence, the senator added.
No other country has the rules and oversight this country has, Feinstein said. And with Russian agents working throughout the world and China working every day to grab business and technology secrets, this is no time to abdicate our responsibilities because other countries “would eat us up. ... People look for our innovation, they lust for our innovation.”
She also blamed the times for what seems to be an increasing lack of trust in government.
“Trust goes up when there is no controversy, and trust goes down when there is controversy,” Feinstein said. “These days, it seems more difficult to get anything done.”
But Feinstein believes she has an important role to play on the Intelligence Committee.
“To do this right, to do this well, to protect our values ... this was my chance to do this,” she said.