Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman.

Mr. Speaker, the USA FREEDOM Act represents a return to the basic principle of the Fourth Amendment, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Before the government may search our homes, seize our persons, or intercept our communications, it must first make a showing of individualized suspicion. The intrusion it requests must be as targeted and as brief as circumstances allow. The Fourth Amendment demands no less.

That is why we are here today. We have learned that the government has engaged in unreasonable searches against all of us. It has gathered an enormous amount of information about every phone call in the United States. It has deemed all of our phone calls relevant to a terrorism investigation. It is intolerable to our sense of freedom.

Today, we are acting to stop it. The bill before us prohibits the intelligence community from engaging in bulk data collection within the United States.

This practice, the dragnet collection without a warrant of telephone records and Internet metadata, is the contemporary equivalent of the British writs of assistance that early American revolutionaries opposed and that the Fourth Amendment was drafted to outlaw. It has never complied with the Constitution and must be brought to an end without delay.

The legal theories that justified these programs were developed and approved in secret, and that practice must also come to an end. There must not be a body of secret law in the United States.

Section 215 says tangible things may be seized if they are relevant to a terrorism investigation. The government's interpretation that this means ``everything'' is obviously wrong, could only have been advanced in secret, and cannot withstand the public scrutiny to which it is now subjected. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals threw out this notion last week, and now, we must do so as well.

This bill further requires the government to promptly declassify and release each novel or significant opinion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In the future, if the government advances a similarly dubious legal claim, there will be an advocate in court to oppose it. If the court should agree with the novel claim, the public will know about it almost immediately, and the responsibility will lie with us to correct it just as quickly.

Before I close, I want to be clear. Not every reform I would have hoped to enact is included in this bill. We must do more to protect U.S. person information collected under section 702 of FISA. We must act to reform other authorities, many of them law enforcement rather than intelligence community authorities, to prevent indiscriminate searches in other circumstances.

I will continue to fight for these reforms, among others, and I know that I will not be alone in taking up that challenge in the days to come, but I am grateful that we have the opportunity to take this first major step to restore the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects and to do so without in any way endangering national security.

I thank Chairman Goodlatte, Chairman Sensenbrenner, and Ranking Member Conyers for their continued leadership on this legislation, and I urge every one of my colleagues to support this bill.

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