Political Quotes

“Mr. President, the Senate will be voting soon on a bill to reauthorize the FISA Amendments Act. Most Americans likely do not recognize the name of the bill, but they probably know what this bill addresses--our government's surveillance of communications. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I have learned a great deal about our post-9/11 surveillance laws and how they have been implemented, and I have determined that there are reforms that need to be made to the FISA Amendments Act--specifically section 702--before we renew this law. The single biggest flaw in section 702 is how it has been interpreted. The language of the law--the collection of foreign intelligence of U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States--anticipates that incidental or accidental collection of Americans' emails or even phone calls could occur, but under the FISA Amendments Act as written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications collected under this statute to deliberately search for the phone calls or the emails of specific Americans. This is not what Congress intended when the law was written, and now we are being asked to vote on this law at the last minute with not a single amendment allowed. Many of us have called this the backdoor search loophole since it allows the government to search for Americans' communications without a warrant--let me repeat that--without a warrant.…”