Providing for Consideration of H.R. Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act; Providing for Consideration of H.R. Extending Limits of U.S. Customs Waters Act; Providing for Consideration of H. Res. Denouncing the Biden Administration's Immigration Policies; and Providing for Consideration of H. Res. Opposing Efforts to Place One-Sided Pressure on Israel with Respect to Gaza

Floor Speech

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Mrs. SPARTZ. Mr. Speaker, I want to assure you I have significant concerns about why it does not address some material potential violations of Fourth Amendment rights of Americans. It really has to do a lot with upstream collection, and I will explain what it is.

Upstream collection is where the government and the State can go in the backbone and collect data about all Americans, whatever they want, and then they have to go through minimization procedures. Supposedly, this minimization procedure is supposed to limit the data that they incidentally collect about Americans.

Well, the challenge is no one ever audits and checks what they are doing.

Mr. Speaker, if you remember what happened in 2016, where pretty much these minimization procedures didn't allow to collect about information. It means that if you have the name of some potential terrorist in the body of your email, they can collect your data but NSA still did it. They collected the data.

Mr. Speaker, what happened? We don't know what happened; but we also know in 2022 that a new technique was authorized where, according to the review of the oversight board, if used in a widespread way and not minimized, it can be extraordinarily intrusive.

This is a very new sensitive technique, but no one ever checked this. We know these agencies, how they felt so many times collecting data on Americans. We are turning into a police state. This is a material flaw with this bill, and I want to raise significant concerns that it has to be addressed or we are just putting lipstick on a pig.

Ms. LEGER FERNANDEZ.

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