On the recordJuly 30, 2014
I rise today to talk about the transparency provisions in the USA FREEDOM Act. I am a proud cosponsor of Chairman Leahy's bill, and I am particularly proud to have written its key transparency provisions with my friend Senator Dean Heller of Nevada. As I said yesterday, both of us are indebted to Senator Leahy for his leadership on this issue. For over a year now there has been a steady stream of news stories about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. Yet right now, by law, Americans still cannot get very basic information about these programs. Americans understand that we need to give due weight to privacy on the one hand and national security on the other. But when they lack an even rough sense of the scope of the government's surveillance programs, they have no way to know if the government is getting that balance right. There needs to be more transparency. The controversy unleashed by Edward Snowden's disclosures has been going on for over a year. Yet Americans still don't know the actual number of people whose information has been collected under these programs. They don't even know how many of these people are Americans, and they have no way of knowing how many of these Americans had their information actually looked at by government officials as opposed to just being held in a database. This lack of transparency is pretty breathtaking.…
