On the recordFebruary 10, 2011
I want to again bring your attention to section 215 and the difficulty which we in this body and the American people as a whole have with regard to exercising oversight over abuse of government authority. An example that I gave earlier, the American Library Association confirmed that the Federal Government went into a library and asked for the list of everybody who checked out a book on Osama bin Laden. Now, recipients of 215 orders can't even disclose that they received such an order to anybody but their attorneys. So what ability do we have as the People's House to exercise oversight about whether there are abuses? It has been brought out by several people on the other side, my colleague from Wisconsin, oh, there aren't abuses. Well, if there is a secretive process that prevents us from knowing about abuses, how are we to know in fact whether there are abuses? I also want to discuss section 206 that we are discussing the renewal of here today, the provision of the bill that allows the government to conduct the roving wiretaps. This allows the government to obtain surveillance warrants that don't even specify the person or the object that is being tapped. It could involve tapping an entire neighborhood of telephones that a suspect might use--an unnamed suspect--might use or might not use. There is nothing even to specifically prohibit it from being an entire city of telephone calls being tapped. And we don't know how it has been used.
