USA Freedom Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. RUBIO. I thank the Presiding Officer.

God forbid tomorrow morning we wake up to the news that a member of ISIL is in the United States and Federal agencies need to determine who this person is coordinating with to carry out a potential attack within the homeland. One of the tools they will use is a tool that allows them to see the people they have been calling and interacting with so we can disrupt that cell before they carry out a horrifying attack that could kill millions of American people.

Today we are able to do that because of a program that collects those records and keeps them--not in the hands of anyone who is looking at them on a regular basis but keeps them readily available for the government so the government can access those records and disrupt that plot. What this bill would do is take that apart. In essence, it would ask the companies to keep those records--at least in the hopes that they would. Under this plan, if this were to pass, if suddenly we were to go target these members of ISIL and find out whom they are coordinating with, those records may not be there and that plot may indeed go forward. That would be a horrifying result.

Here is why this doesn't make sense. First of all, we are rushing this to the floor of the Senate in a lameduck session, on an issue that doesn't even expire until next year, on a bill that was not listened to or heard in a committee, and they cannot cite a single example of this program ever being abused--not one simple example of this specific program being abused by anybody intentionally. So we are dealing with a theoretical threat.

The second thing is that even as we speak, law enforcement agencies investigating a common crime don't even need to go to a court to access these very same records. They can just issue an administrative subpoena and get ahold of them. We are actually making it harder to go after a terrorist than it will be to go after a common criminal.

This is happening at a time when homegrown violent extremism is the single fastest growing threat to the United States, people here at home who have been radicalized--even on the Internet--and people who have traveled to the Middle East and been radicalized in the hopes of returning and carrying out attacks here.

I hope this body would take more time to study an issue of this magnitude because this program was specifically designed to address the intelligence gaps that existed after the 9/11 attacks. I promise you, if, God forbid, any horrifying event like that were to happen, the first question we will be asked is why didn't we know about it and why didn't we prevent it. If this program is gutted, we potentially will not be able to know about it, and we will not be able to prevent it.

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