Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. COTTON. Madam Chairwoman, I rise to strongly urge opposition to the Amash amendment.

This program has stopped dozens of terrorist attacks. That means it's saved untold American lives.

This amendment is not simple. It does not limit the program. It does not modify it. It does not constrain the program. It ends the program. It blows it up. Some of you've heard the analogy that if you want to search for a needle in a haystack, you have to have the haystack. This takes a leaf blower and blows away the entire haystack. You will not have this program if this amendment passes. And it does so, despite all of the safeguards you have already heard.

This program is constitutional under Supreme Court precedent--not recent precedent. Precedent goes back to 1979, just 2 years after I was born, the year that one of the young sponsors of this amendment was born. This program is approved by large bipartisan majorities of this body on the statute--text that they approved, not their secret intents or wishes.

It is overseen by article III judges who have been confirmed by the Senate and are independent of the executive branch. It is reviewed by the Intelligence Committees, and it is executed primarily by military officers, not generals, but the majors and the colonels who have been fighting and bleeding for this country for 12 years.

What is it, metadata? It sounds kind of scary. It's nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet with five columns: called to, called from, date, time, and the duration. Five columns, billions of rows. It's in a lockbox. It can't be searched unless you have specific suspicion of a number being used by a terrorist. Only then do they go into that database and do they run a search for what that number has been calling.

Why do you need it? Verizon, AT&T, other companies will not keep this data for the years necessary. Secondly, you need it quickly. When I was in Iraq as a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne, if we rolled up a bad guy and we found a cell phone or we found a thumb drive, we would immediately upload that data so intelligence professionals could search it so they could go roll up another bad guy, because you only have a few hours to stop a terrorist once you catch another terrorist.

Folks, we are at war. You may not like that truth. I wish it weren't the truth. But it is the truth. We're at war. Do not take this tool away from our warriors on the frontline.

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