Protecting Volunteer Firefighters And Emergency Responders Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, since the unlawful leaks of NSA programs, opponents of our counterterrorism program have painted a distorted picture of how these programs are conducted and overseen by exploiting the fact that our intelligence community cannot discuss classified activities. So what you have is an effort to characterize our NSA programs, and the officials who conduct them cannot discuss the classified activities. So they are clearly at a disadvantage.

Since September 11, 2001, FISA has been critically important in keeping us safe here in America. According to the CIA, had these authorities been in place more than a decade ago, they would likely--likely--have prevented Ð9/11. Not only have these tools kept us safe, there has not been a single incident--not one--of an intentional abuse of them.

The NSA is overseen by the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government. They are not running rogue out there. The NSA is overseen by the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our government. The employees of NSA are highly trained, supervised, and tested.

The expiring provisions of FISA are ideally suited for the terrorist threats we face in 2015. These provisions work together to protect us from foreign terrorists abroad who use social and other media to conspire and eventually plan attacks inside the United States.

ISIL uses Facebook, uses Twitter, its online magazine, and other social media platforms to contact and eventually radicalize recruits online. If our intelligence community cannot connect the dots of information, we cannot stop this determined enemy from launching attacks.

Under section 215 authority, the NSA can find connections--find connections--from known terrorists overseas and connect that to potential terrorists in the United States. But the NSA cannot query the database, which consists of call data records such as the number calling, the number called, and the duration, without a court order.

Let me say that again. NSA cannot query the database, which consists of call data records such as number calling, the number called, and the duration, without a court order. Under section 215, the NSA cannot listen to phone calls of Americans at all. Under section 215, the NSA cannot listen to the phone calls of Americans at all.

Despite the value of the section 215 program and the rigorous safeguards that govern it, critics of the program either want to do away with it or make it much more difficult to use. Many of them are proposing a bill--the USA FREEDOM Act--that they say will keep us safe while protecting our privacy. It will do neither. It will neither keep us safe nor protect our privacy. It will make us more vulnerable and it risks compromising our privacy.

The USA FREEDOM Act would replace section 215 with an untested, untried, and more cumbersome system. It would not end bulk collection of call data. Instead, it would have untrained--untrained--corporate employees with uncertain supervision and protocols do the collecting. So it switches this responsibility from the NSA, with total oversight, to corporate employees with uncertain supervision and protocols. They get to do the collecting. It would establish a wall between the NSA analysts and the data they are trying to analyze. At best, the new system envisioned by the USA FREEDOM Act would be more cumbersome and time consuming to use when speed and agility are absolutely crucial. At worst, it will not work at all because there is no requirement in the legislation that the telecoms hold the data for any length of time. Put differently, section 215 helped us find the needle in a haystack, but under the USA FREEDOM Act, there may not be a haystack to look through at all.

In short, the opponents of America's counterterror programs would rather trust telecommunication companies to hold this data and search it on behalf of our government. These companies have no programs, no training or tools to search the databases they would need to create, and if that isn't bad enough, we would have to pay them to do it. The taxpayers would have to pay them to do it.

In addition to making us less safe, the USA FREEDOM Act would make our privacy less secure. The section 215 program is subject to rigorous controls and strict oversight. Only a limited number of intelligence professionals have access to the data. There are strict limits on when and for what purpose they can access the data. Their access to the data is closely supervised with numerous--numerous--levels of review. These safeguards will not apply to the untried and novel system under the USA FREEDOM Act, and rather than storing the information securely at NSA, the information would be held by private companies instead.

There was an excellent editorial today in the Wall Street Journal pointing out the challenges we face. It was entitled the ``Snowden Blindfold Act.'' The ``Snowden Blindfold Act'' was the headline in the Wall Street Journal today.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of that article.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD

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