Sir, I believe that General Hayden, the deputy director 
    of intelligence, yesterday, confirmed that before there 
    is any interception, there is a determination made by an 
    intelligence officers at NSA that, in fact, we have 
    reasonable grounds to believe that one party in the 
    communication is a member or agent of Al Qaida or an 
    affiliated terrorist organization. 

    And we do have a great number of checks in place to 
    ensure, I am told, by the operations folks that, to a 
    great degree of certainty, a high degree of confidence, 
    that these calls are solely international calls.

    I'm going to start with something that's just peripheral 
    to the issues we're on, but it does deal with our national
    security, and it's the leak of this information to the New
    York Times. And I'm greatly concerned about this. And these
    leaks could be putting our nation's safety into serious 
    jeopardy. 

    Could you tell us what is being done to investigate who 
    leaked this national security information and whether the 
    Department of Justice will initiate a prosecution of an 
    individual leaking the information?

    Senator, we have confirmed the department has initiated 
    an investigation into possible crimes here. And consistent
    with department practice, I'm not going to talk much 
    further about an ongoing investigation.

    Obviously, we have to look at the evidence, and if the 
    evidence shows that a crime has been committed, then 
    obviously we'll have to make a decision about moving 
    forward with a prosecution.

    And I don't blame you for this, but I don't hear as much 
    about public outcry about this leak as I did about 
    Valerie Plame and the White House disclosures of her -- 
    or presumed disclosures of her identify of a CIA agent. 
    And to me that's a two-bit nothing compared to this sort 
    of issue that we have before us of this information being 
    leaked to the press.