CNN "Newsroom" - Transcript: National Security

Interview

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Joining me now on the phone is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the bill's sponsor, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Good morning, sir.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY (D), VERMONT (via telephone): Good morning. It's good to be with you.

COSTELLO: It's good to have you here this morning. Senator Dan Coates says your bill goes too far at a time the U.S. needs as many tools in its arsenal as possible. In other words, ISIS is inspiring these lone wolves who are notoriously hard to stop. Is this the right time to curb the nation's spy agency?

LEAHY: Of course it's the right time. And I - you know, I understand Dan Coates has his feelings, but he's wrong on this. I think the reason why there are so many people that sponsored my bill, they go from the right to left, and I'll give an example. Ted Cruz of Texas to Chuck Schumer of New York.

The -- but more importantly, it's backed by the director of National Intelligence, by the attorney general. Most of the high-tech companies know that if we don't have something like my bill, they're going to lose tens of billions of dollars in business overseas because people will stop trusting the United States. My bill is just a common sense way of saying collect information, but do it in a way where you protect the interests of innocent people.

COSTELLO: Uh-huh.

LEAHY: You know, if you collect everything, in some ways you have nothing. The director of NSA started talking about stopping 50 terrorist cases by their massive collection. But when you have to test by an open hearing where you have to follow the law and test via (ph) accurately, that came down to possibly one case. In the meantime, though, their own system was so laxed, they let a 29-year-old subcontractor, Edward Snowden, walk off with every embarrassing secret they had.

COSTELLO: Well, I'm glad you bring him up, senator, because Matthew Olson, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, says terrorists are changing how they communicate to avoid surveillance because of Edward Snowden's disclosures about NSA methods. And critics argue the NSA need latitude at this time because of Edward Snowden to refigure their methods without congressional interference. Do they have a point?

LEAHY: No. And, in fact, if they had followed some of the rules that we talked about, you never would have had an Edward Snowden. I mean this was pure carelessness on the part of the NSA. They talked about how well they protect everything. They couldn't even protect their greatest secrets from a subcontractor.

What we're saying is, make sure you go after the real targets. Make sure you do it in the way that we can follow through. I think that's why the director of National Intelligence supports my bill, but so do groups from the right to the left. The companies that have to actually carry out this mission, they do it. But most importantly, we have some way of knowing if our government is doing the things it should to keep us safe, and not doing things like just spying on us for the sake of spying on us.

Those of us who lived back in the time of J. Edgar Hoover realize how tyrannical our government could be if it was allowed to spy on everybody with no checks and balances. We -- you're always going to find something that people say, oh my God, look at this. We've got a terrorist attack in Canada. We forget one of the biggest terrorist attacks in this country was Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, a retired military person, church-going American, and nothing that they talked about in all of these possible pieces of legislation would have stopped Timothy McVeigh from carrying out a horrific murderous attack on Americans.

COSTELLO: Well, Senator Patrick Leahy, I have to leave it there, and thank you so much.

And we did extend an invitation to Senator Dan Coates to come on and that invitation still stands.

Thank you so much, Senator Leahy. I appreciate it.

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