Patriot Act opponents like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul are using a "scare approach" that if successful, could leave the nation vulnerable to another 9/11 terrorist strike, former CIA director James Woolsey warns.
In an interview with "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth on
Newsmax TV Thursday, Woolsey argued for renewal without modification of the Patriot Act, which has allowed for mass email and phone data collection by the NSA.
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"Sen. Paul and others make it sound as if there's this massive surveillance of the substance of what's in our emails and our telephone conversations by the government, and that's simply not true," Woolsey said.
"It is a scare approach and I think if we get rid of this capability for the National Security Agency, we will make a very bad choice indeed."
Woolsey explained the data collection issue goes back to the mid-20th century, with the Supreme Court being asked to consider whether the government, through the Post Office, could conduct a surveillance of the address, return address, and postmark on envelopes.
Woolsey said the question was "could they keep a record of your mail because they suspected, without having a warrant, that you might be corresponding with someone who is a criminal or a terrorist or whatever."
"That went up to the Supreme Court and the government won," he noted. "It has been legal since the 1950s or early '60s for there to be so-called mail surveillance of that sort."
But thousands of first-class letters in the mail today have been replaced by "tens to hundreds of millions of emails and phone calls," Woolsey noted.
"And the NSA was operating under the principles of the Supreme Court decision," he said. "They were not getting into, I'm told, the substance of people's emails. They were only keeping a record of phone calls of who they were from and who they were to and what the date was."
"That would mean that if a known terrorist continues to correspond back and forth by email with you or me and the government grows suspicious, they could then go to a court and try to obtain a warrant to look at the substance of the email," he added. "But they could not do that, they could not look at the substance without a warrant."
Woolsey said the 9/11 terror strike on U.S. soil occurred "in part because the CIA and the FBI couldn't talk to one another over a number of issues and it wasn't their fault."
"It was a ruling by the Justice Department keeping them apart from one another," he asserted. "I'm afraid that Sen. Paul and others are going to have the same thing happen."
Woolsey also told Hayworth that China, flush with a successful economy and "some information and intellectual property stolen from us," is now flexing its military muscle with its claims of sovereignty over
man-made islands in the South China Sea.
"They are being pretty aggressive; they're trying to keep people away from the artificial islands that they're building there in the South China Sea," he said. "If there's anybody in the world who can be the guardian of freedom of the seas it's us, and so this is pushing us into some confrontations with them. I wish they would stand down and act normally because it's a nervous-making situation … They are making everybody a bit nervous by their aggressive behavior."
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