USA FREEDOM Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the USA FREEDOM Act. This bill ends the bulk collection of American's telephone records and puts in place reforms to surveillance authorities to protect privacy and increased transparency.

I have long advocated that the telephone metadata program should end in favor of a system in which telecommunications providers retain their own records so they can be queried based on a court-approved, reasonable, articulable suspicion standard. That is precisely what this bill puts in place. It allows us to keep the capabilities that we need to protect the Nation from terrorist plots while protecting privacy and civil liberties.

There are remaining ways that the bill can be improved, and I hope as it heads to the Senate there will be opportunities to do so. In particular, I would like to see provisions to introduce an adversarial process in the FISA Court. The FISA Court and the public trust would benefit from an independent advocate in the limited number of cases that call for significant statutory interpretation or novel legal issues. I hope that the Senate will include such provisions, which would be both wise and constitutionally sound.

With that, I urge a ``yes'' vote, and I compliment my chair and ranking member on the extraordinary job they have done.

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