Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague. The first of these examples--and they really are kind of overblown examples about the effectiveness of bulk collection--is the case of an individual named Najibullah Zazi. Mr. Zazi was a known terrorism suspect, and a number of people have suggested that bulk phone records collection was somehow essential to stopping him because a query of the bulk phone records database for numbers linked to Mr. Zazi returned a previously unknown number belonging to another terrorism suspect. However, since the government had already identified Zazi as a terrorism suspect prior to querying the bulk phone records database, it had all the evidence it needed to obtain the phone records of Zazi and his associates using an individualized section 215 order or other legal authorities. In the second case, some have pointed to Mr. Moalin, the San Diego man convicted of sending $8,500 to support al-Shabaab in Somalia. The intelligence community has indicated that information from the bulk phone records database ``established a connection between a phone number known to be used by an extremist overseas . . . and an unknown San Diego-based number'' that belonged to Mr. Moalin. Yet there are ample existing authorities under which the United States can conduct surveillance on a phone number known to be used by extremists overseas and other phone numbers in contact with that phone number. The argument that Mr.…”