Richard Burr: “I would agree exactly with that statement. The collection has nothing to do with the content of a call. To do that would…”

“I would agree exactly with that statement. The collection has nothing to do with the content of a call. To do that would take an investigation into an individual and an additional court process that would probably be pursued by the FBI, not the NSA, to look at the content. I think when the American people see this thing dissected, in reality, they will see that my telephone number without my name isn't really an intrusion, the time the call was made really isn't an intrusion, the duration of the call really isn't an intrusion, and now I know they are not collecting anything that was said, that there is no content in it and that this metadata base is only telephone numbers. There is a legitimate question the American people ask: Why did we create this program? Well, it was created in the Department of Defense. It was transferred over to the intelligence community. The purpose of it was in real time to be able to search or query a massive amount of data. A few weeks ago, we, the United States, went into Syria and we got a bad guy. And we got hard drives and we got telephones and we got a lot of SIM cards. Those telephone numbers now, hopefully--don't know but hopefully--we are testing them in the metadata base to see if those phones talked to anybody in the United States. Why? I think the American people want us to know if terrorists are talking to somebody in this country. I think they really do want us to know that.…”