Political Quotes

“we will be talking about the PATRIOT Act and the USA FREEDOM Act that has been offered, and I think it is an important issue. I believe the PATRIOT Act provides critical tools that have helped protect America, and I believe it does so without any infringement on constitutional rights. Some say we have to compromise rights or balance rights against the threats. Maybe sometimes we have to do that. But when we wrote the PATRIOT Act in the Judiciary Committee--of which I am a member, Senator Leahy is a strong libertarian, Senator Hatch is a strong libertarian, Senator Hatch was chairman, Senator Leahy was ranking member, I had been a Federal prosecutor for 15 years; people like Jon Kyl and Dianne Feinstein and so many others worked on it for months--it wasn't passed in a few days without thought. People talked about it. It was on the radio and television, we got letters, we had hearings with professors and constitutional scholars, law enforcement officers, some public and some classified briefings, and we tried to write a bill, and I believe did, that provided the Federal Government an expedited method to access phone call data, metadata as it is called, under section 215 of the act. Now, this data has no content--no phone communications at all. It is just phone numbers, even less than you get on your telephone bill when it comes to you in the mail every month. That data is maintained at the telephone companies in their records.…”