Political Quotes

“let me cut through some of the rhetoric and tell you what the SAFE Act does. The SAFE Act would place reasonable checks on what are known as roving wiretaps. Typically, when the Government seeks a warrant authorizing a wiretap, its application must specify the individual and the phone that will be tapped. A recommendation on roving wiretaps came to us in the PATRIOT Act because of the obvious: There was a time and place in America when people had one telephone at work, one telephone at home, and if the Government sought to tap that telephone to find out what was going on, it was pretty obvious which telephone lines needed to be tapped. Now we live in a different world where people carry around phones in their pockets. People may have several phones. So the Government asked for additional authority to focus on those who were engaged in telephone conversations on numerous different telephone lines. Roving wiretaps do not require the Government to specify the phone being tapped. They are designed to allow law enforcement to track targets that evade surveillance by frequently changing phones. Before the PATRIOT Act, they were only permitted for criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations. The PATRIOT Act authorized the FBI to use roving wiretaps for intelligence purposes for the first time. I supported this. I thought it was a reasonable expansion of wiretap authority because it is important that intelligence investigators have that authority.”