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

Floor Speech

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Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Speaker, I believe this bill makes meaningful reform to a few of the surveillance programs, but it in no way stops all of the bulk collection of U.S. person communications currently occurring. This bill won't stop the most egregious and widely reported privacy violations that occur under section 702 and Executive Order No. 12333.

In a declassified decision, the FISA court said that the NSA had been collecting substantially more U.S. person communications through its upstream collection program than it had originally told the court. With upstream collection, the NSA directly taps into international Internet cables to search through all of the communications that flow through it, looking for communications that map certain criteria.

Four years ago, the court found that the government was collecting tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications a year. Why? Because all of your data is everywhere. No accurate estimate can be given for the even larger number of communications collected in which a U.S. person was a party to the communication.

The Director of National Intelligence confirmed the government searches this vast amount of data, including the content of email and of telephone calls, without individualized suspicion, probable cause, and without a warrant. The Director of the FBI says they use information to build criminal cases against U.S. persons. This is an end run around the Fourth Amendment, and it has to stop.

This bill did not create those problems. However, this bill doesn't correct those problems. During the markup of the bill, Chairman Goodlatte stated that these issues would be next, but we can't afford to wait until the final hour of expiration to take action like we did with this bill. To do so would mean at least another 2 years of the mass surveillance of Americans, which is unconscionable. Last year, the House voted 293-123 to close these backdoor loopholes, but the Rules Committee would not allow the House to vote today to put these fixes into this bill.

I voted in committee to advance this bill for a couple of reasons, and I do want to thank all of the members who worked on this but single out Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who was the author of the bill and who has worked so hard to make sure that improvements are made. The bill is an improvement over a straight reauthorization of the bill. I also listened carefully to the verbal commitments that the 702 fix would be included, and I reserve the right to oppose this bill when it comes back from the Senate if we can't close these loopholes.

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