Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. MASSIE. Thank you, Judge Poe, for introducing this amendment. This was substantially the same amendment that we offered last summer that passed with a veto-proof majority 293-123.

Back doors are bad for three reasons. When the government forces companies to put back doors or weaken their encryption, it is bad for security because hackers are going to find these back doors and other foreign countries will find these back doors.

It is bad for privacy because the Fourth Amendment can be violated. And it is bad for business. As my colleague Zoe Lofgren from California mentioned, it is bad for business because it makes us less competitive overseas. Who wants to buy a piece of defective software that was made defective by our government?

So I urge Members to vote for this amendment because it would prevent all of these bad things from occurring.

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Mr. MASSIE. Madam Chair, I am very excited to report that, thanks to the farm bill amendment that allowed for pilot programs, we grew many pilot programs in Kentucky last summer; and this summer, there will be about 1,800 acres of hemp grown in Kentucky in pilot programs.

We have venture capital coming to Kentucky. I met with two companies in Kentucky that are investing in hemp, but the problem is right now they can only do the pilot programs. Yet they are still going to grow 1,800 acres of it in Kentucky alone. They grow 100,000 acres in Canada.

It is time to let our farmers have this opportunity. We need to take away the restraint that it is just a pilot program. We have addressed a lot of the concerns that people had last year before these pilot programs. Law enforcement are okay with hemp now. They have seen that it is not its cousin.

With that, Madam Chair, I urge passage and urge my colleagues to vote for this amendment.

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