U.S. National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell said Sunday that President Bush was correct to say that there is a security risk from Congress' failure to expand the legal framework for how the government can monitor suspected spies and terrorists.

In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” McConnell said Bush “is repeating advice that I'm giving him” since an expanded version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lapsed Saturday.

“And our situation now, when the terrorist threat is increasing because they've achieved -- al-Qaida's achieved de facto safe haven in the border area of Pakistan and Afghanistan -- the threat is going up,” McConnell said.

He added, “And therefore we do not have the agility and the speed that we had before to be able to move and try to capture their communications to thwart their planning.”

(Article continues below)

McConnell said enemies of the United States are using “new information, new personalities, new methods of communicating” and current U.S. law does not take that into account.

Bush, in his weekly radio address Saturday, said: “At this moment, somewhere in the world, terrorists are planning a new attack on America.”

He added that not expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act makes it “harder for our government to keep you safe from terrorist attack.”

The proposal stalled in the House, after the Senate approved legislation granting immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the U.S. government's wiretapping program after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

About 40 lawsuits have been filed against telecommunications firms AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications Inc and Sprint Nextel Corp by individuals alleging privacy violations.

In August, the Democrat-led Congress temporarily expanded the president's authority to monitor telephone calls and e-mail messages between people in the United States and terror suspects abroad.

The temporary measure, the Protect America Act, lapsed on Saturday. It allowed the federal government to eavesdrop without a court order on communications conducted by a suspect believed to be outside the United States, even if an American is on one end of the conversation so long as the American is not the target of the surveillance.