From Epic Alert Volume 2.07 Published by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Washington, DC info@epic.org WWW http://epic.org Testimony of FBI Director Louis Freeh before House Committee on Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, May 3, 1995 ... With respect to the authorities that we have, as we testified in the Senate last week, the FBI is very comfortable with the attorney general guidelines. I feel very confident that, interpreted broadly, and certainly within the Constitution, those guidelines give me and my agents the authority we need to investigate and prevent, in many cases, what would be clear violations of criminal law and clear terrorist activity within the United States ... We need the authority to trace money, explosives, nuclear materials and terrorists. Pen registers and trap-and-trace devices are necessary in counterterrorism as well as counterintelligence cases. The threshold ought to be the same in a criminal case as in a terrorism case. It's critical that investigators have increased access, short of a full-blown grand jury investigation, to hotel, motel and common-carrier records. ... Encryption capabilities available to criminals and terrorists, both now and in days to come, must be dealt with promptly. We will not have an effective counterterrorism stat- counterterrorism strategy if we do not solve the problem of encryption. It's not a problem unique, by the way, to terrorists. It's one which addresses itself to drug dealers and cartels and criminals at large. There are now no legally available means in some dangerously few cases to exclude and remove alien terrorists from the United States. Again, that's an issue that this committee has already taken up. These are tools. These are not new authorities. These are tools with which to use our current statutory authority, all, in my view, well within the Constitution. And the addition of those resources, which are people and technologies, will give us the ability to deal with these cases as well as prepare for and prevent other incidents such as the one we've seen recently.