Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. MASSIE. Mr. Chairman, the American people don't want to be spied on by their own government. Our Founding Fathers included the Fourth Amendment for a reason: to require probable cause and a warrant before the government and government agents can snoop on anyone.

During the 113th Congress, the House of Representatives passed the bipartisan amendment I am offering today by a 293-123 vote. This year, our bipartisan group is reuniting once again to shut down unconstitutional surveillance that does not meet the expectations of our constituents or the standards required by our Constitution.

Our amendment shuts one form of backdoor surveillance by prohibiting warrantless searches of government databases for information that pertains to U.S. citizens.

The Director of National Intelligence has confirmed that the government searches vast amounts of data, including the content of emails and telephone calls without individual suspicion or probable cause.

At this time, I submit for the Record a letter from the Director of National Intelligence, which confirms this warrantless spying.

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Mr. MASSIE. Mr. Chairman, the Director of the FBI has also confirmed that he uses the information to build criminal cases against U.S. persons, but the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI are not above the Fourth Amendment, and this practice should end.

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Mr. MASSIE. Mr. Chairman, as my colleague stated, my amendment also prohibits NSA and the CIA from placing backdoors into commercial products.

This is important because, in December of 2013, it was reported that a U.S. security company had received $10 million from the NSA to use a flawed encryption method. Our government should strengthen technology that protects our privacy, not take advantage of it.

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Mr. MASSIE. Mr. Chairman, now, it has been said here tonight that this is not the time or the place to address these problems with 702, but, look, we have a constitutional crisis, and this was the excuse we were given in the Judiciary Committee when my colleague tried to get the amendment allowed there.

It was the same excuse I was given in the Rules Committee when we had an opportunity to address this, and I would maintain that 2017, 2 years from now, is too long to go in this constitutional crisis situation where we recognize something that illegal and/or unconstitutional is occurring; yet we don't do anything about it. This is the time to do something about it; this is the place to do something about it.

I urge my colleagues to vote for this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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