USA FREEDOM Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEAHY. We have confirmed three judges from Georgia and I want to compliment the two Senators from Georgia for their hard work, both in the Judiciary Committee and the White House. And in that, I am sorry they had to wait so long. On this side of the aisle we cleared every one of those for a voice vote months ago. I am sorry that your side wanted to delay it, but I see a 100-0 vote, and the voice votes are accurate. But I compliment the two Senators from Georgia for sticking with their nominees.

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Mr. LEAHY. I thank the junior Senator from Utah who has worked so hard on this.

It has been more than a year since Americans first learned that the government had been secretly sweeping up the telephone records of innocent Americans, regardless of whether there was any connection whatsoever to terrorism or criminal activity. I introduced the original USA FREEDOM Act last October with Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, and the Senate Judiciary Committee held six public hearings to address these issues.

During those hearings, we learned that the bulk phone records collection program had not, as previously advertised, thwarted 54 terrorist plots, or even dozens, or even a few. In fact, we learned through our public hearings that after all the talk about why we needed this program, we learned that the number was maybe one. That is an important fact for these who argue that the NSA's bulk phone records program is somehow essential to our fight against ISIL or other terrorists. It did nothing to stop ISIL from starting in the first place.

Our bill protects Americans. It enhances privacy protections and ends indiscriminate data collection by the NSA, but also keeps the essential tools our intelligence community needs to protect our Nation. That is the simple truth and important to remember. That is why our intelligence community strongly supports this bill.

As someone who worked in law enforcement, and as a native of Vermont where the right of privacy is cherished, I know we can have both liberty and security. The USA FREEDOM Act provides for commonsense reforms to government surveillance, and promotes greater accountability and transparency of the government's surveillance programs, and it improves the FISA Court.

This is a carefully crafted bill that builds on the work of the House of Representatives.

It has the unprecedented support of the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, the Director of the NSA, American technology companies, and privacy and civil liberties groups across the political spectrum, ranging from the ACLU and EFF to the NRA and TechFreedom. Lawmakers from all parts of the political spectrum, from the right to left, support the USA FREEDOM Act. They know it is a reasonable and responsible compromise. There is no reason why we should not proceed to a debate on this important bill.

I understand that there are some Members who want votes on parts of it, and that is fine. Let's have the votes. Let's not block this bill and say: Well, we want something better. That means you don't vote yes, you don't vote no, you vote maybe. Let's have some relevant amendments, and let's vote on them. Don't let this get bogged down in procedural nonsense that the American public hates. Senators should allow us to get onto this bill and help us reach an agreement on a limited list of germane amendments to be considered. Let's have germane amendments and vote them up or down. If we work together, we can finish the bill by the end of the week.

We cannot afford to delay action on these reforms until next year. As both the ACLU and the NRA pointed out yesterday in a joint op-ed in the Washington Times, ``every day that the Senate fails to vote on these reforms is a day in which law-abiding citizens have reason to fear that the constitutional protections so dear to the Founders and so crucial to the functioning of a free society no longer apply.''

I echoed the words we heard from the Senator from Utah. Every day that we fail to act is another day that American businesses are harmed. One conservative think tank estimated that the ``mistrust engendered by the NSA's programs could cost the U.S. technology industry between $35 billion and $180 billion over the next three years.'' That is a staggering amount.

Senators should listen to the intelligence community professionals who protect our nation every day, and who are calling for swift passage of this bill. Ask the Director of National Intelligence. Ask the Attorney General. They will tell you that it is better for our national security, and better for our fight against terrorism if we pass the USA FREEDOM Act.

This is a reasonable compromise that all Senators should support, and I thank the Majority Leader for bringing this bill to the floor. And I thank Senators Dean Heller, Mike Lee, Dick Durbin, Al Franken, and Richard Blumenthal for their steadfast work on this bill.

Our bill is good for privacy and civil liberties, and upholds our Constitution. It is good for American business. It is good for national security. And most importantly, it is the right thing to do on behalf of Vermonters and the rest of the American people. I urge all Senators to vote in favor of the cloture motion pending before us.

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Mr. RUBIO. I thank the Presiding Officer.

God forbid tomorrow morning we wake up to the news that a member of ISIL is in the United States and Federal agencies need to determine who this person is coordinating with to carry out a potential attack within the homeland. One of the tools they will use is a tool that allows them to see the people they have been calling and interacting with so we can disrupt that cell before they carry out a horrifying attack that could kill millions of American people.

Today we are able to do that because of a program that collects those records and keeps them--not in the hands of anyone who is looking at them on a regular basis but keeps them readily available for the government so the government can access those records and disrupt that plot. What this bill would do is take that apart. In essence, it would ask the companies to keep those records--at least in the hopes that they would. Under this plan, if this were to pass, if suddenly we were to go target these members of ISIL and find out whom they are coordinating with, those records may not be there and that plot may indeed go forward. That would be a horrifying result.

Here is why this doesn't make sense. First of all, we are rushing this to the floor of the Senate in a lameduck session, on an issue that doesn't even expire until next year, on a bill that was not listened to or heard in a committee, and they cannot cite a single example of this program ever being abused--not one simple example of this specific program being abused by anybody intentionally. So we are dealing with a theoretical threat.

The second thing is that even as we speak, law enforcement agencies investigating a common crime don't even need to go to a court to access these very same records. They can just issue an administrative subpoena and get ahold of them. We are actually making it harder to go after a terrorist than it will be to go after a common criminal.

This is happening at a time when homegrown violent extremism is the single fastest growing threat to the United States, people here at home who have been radicalized--even on the Internet--and people who have traveled to the Middle East and been radicalized in the hopes of returning and carrying out attacks here.

I hope this body would take more time to study an issue of this magnitude because this program was specifically designed to address the intelligence gaps that existed after the 9/11 attacks. I promise you, if, God forbid, any horrifying event like that were to happen, the first question we will be asked is why didn't we know about it and why didn't we prevent it. If this program is gutted, we potentially will not be able to know about it, and we will not be able to prevent it.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.

Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, this program does not gut it; it actually enhances it.

Secondly, if this was important to stop ISIL, ISIL never would have started. The fact is that we had this program way beyond anything anybody is talking about today, and it didn't slow up or eliminate ISIL one iota. That is a straw man which we should not even have here. It has no effect on that, and everybody who has read the intelligence knows that.

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Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, obviously I am disappointed by tonight's vote, but I am not new to this fight. We have had six public hearings on this issue. We heard interesting testimony by the head of the NSA who talked about 50-some-odd terrorist activities that have been thwarted by the bulk collection program. When he had to testify in public, it came down to possibly one.

I mention that because people asked whether we had hearings. We had six. But the reason I say I am not new to this fight is the very first vote I cast as a Senator in 1975 was in favor of the Senate resolution that created the Church Committee. I have worked ever since to ensure strong oversight of surveillance authorities.

We found in the Church Committee that administrations of both parties had so badly misused the tools they had in the intelligence community. We tried to put in restrictions that would balance our constitutional rights and the security that we needed as Americans. We tried to do that. I think we did.

That is why over the past decade I have consistently opposed expanding the USA PATRIOT Act and FISA Amendments Act sunsets without including meaningful reforms. The first sunsets were put in place by the Republican leader in the House, Dick Armey, a conservative Republican, and myself in the Senate. We joined together for the same reason: If you do not have an ability to look at these issues on a periodic basis, then they will get out of hand.

I fought the status quo every step of the way in these efforts. The broad coalition of those in favor of the USA FREEDOM Act shows we are gaining ground. While I am critical of those Republicans who failed to answer the call of the American people who elected them to stand up and work across the aisle, those who reverted to scare tactics rather than working productively to protect America's basic privacy rights and our national security--I acknowledge the hard work and principled stance of several Republicans: Senator Heller, Senator Lee, and Senator Cruz, as well as other Republicans in the other body, including my initial partner in this effort, Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner. There have also been two important partners on the Democratic side in this reform effort: Senators Franken and Blumenthal who worked with me on transparency and the FISA Court reforms.

We Vermonters fight to protect our privacy rights. Every Vermonter does. They mean a great deal to us. Every Vermonter feels that way, and this lifelong Vermonter will not give up the fight. I owe that to the Vermonters I serve and to the Constitution I swore an oath to defend.

I would say to those both in this Chamber and outside who approached this issue by fomenting fear, fomenting fear stifles serious debate and constructive solutions, like the carefully drawn reforms in this bill. Doing it at the last minute is all the more regrettable. This Nation deserves more than that.

This Nation should not allow our liberties to be set aside by passing fears.

America will always face the threat of terrorist attacks, both outside our borders and inside. We didn't do away with all our civil liberties after the Oklahoma City bombing. It was an American who did that, somebody who served in our military, churchgoing, and so forth. No more should we do it if the attacks come from outside our country. We talk about 9/11. We had all the evidence necessary to stop 9/11 before it happened.

Everybody who has looked at that now agrees that if we had bothered to translate the material we had, if we had bothered to listen to people in Minnesota who tried to warn us about it, we could have stopped it.

But because mistakes were made then, let's not take away the liberties of 325 million Americans.

I felt this way when I was a prosecutor. We even had people escape from prison with the intent to kill me.

I said: OK. We will get them, but we will follow the law in doing it, and we did.

Mr. President, 13 years ago this week a letter was sent to me. The anthrax in it was so deadly that the one person who touched the envelope--that I was supposed to open--died. They died from it. We still haven't caught all of the people involved.

But notwithstanding that, when people came to me and said: Well, maybe we should do away with some of our search and seizure laws, maybe we should do way with some of our laws for wiretaps, after all somebody tried to kill you. And if you had touched that envelope you would have died.

I said: No, this is more than one Senator, more than one person, more than one individual. This is the Constitution of the United States. If we, 100 Members of this body, do not protect our Constitution, we do not protect our country, and we do not deserve to be in this body.

I will continue to fight, and whatever years I have left in this body, I will continue to fight to preserve our Constitution and our rights as Americans.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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