[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 98 (Monday, June 23, 2014)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1048]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2015

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                             HON. RUSH HOLT

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 18, 2014

       The House in Committee of the Whole House on the state of 
     the Union had under consideration the bill (H.R. 4870) making 
     appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal 
     year ending September 30, 2015, and for other purposes:

  Mr. HOLT. Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to this bill.
  Let me begin by acknowledging the enormous work that went into 
bringing a bill of this scope to the floor. It contains a number of 
provisions I support, including a 1.8% pay increase for our troops and 
other measures designed to improve the lives of our servicemembers and 
their families. I am particularly grateful for the committee's 
inclusion of nearly $40 million above the President's request for 
suicide prevention and outreach activities, and twice what I and 100 of 
my House colleagues had requested earlier this year. I am also grateful 
for the committee's acceptance of an amendment I offered that mandates 
a study on the potential relationship between financial stress and 
suicide among members of the military. In March 2014, we suffered no 
combat deaths but lost 700 servicemembers and veterans to suicide. We 
have to end this epidemic, and I hope these additional investments and 
this study will help bring about that outcome.
  Moreover, this bill now contains important reforms to our nation's 
surveillance practices. Three amendments that I either offered or co-
sponsored were attached to this bill, and they are worth discussing in 
some detail.
  My first amendment would set aside $2 million to expand the 
Intelligence Community Whistleblowing and Source Protection 
Directorate, which provides employees of the National Security Agency 
(NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and other intelligence 
agencies with a safe, legal, and secure way to report abusive or 
unlawful practices. The amendment passed unanimously.
  Currently, this office is literally a one-man operation. Given the 
fact that there are tens of thousands of federal employees and 
contractors who work for Intelligence Community elements, it is simply 
not realistic to expect one person to be able effectively to receive 
and investigate large numbers of valid complaints from conscientious 
internal whistleblowers through, no matter how talented. Because of the 
secrecy of the intelligence community, oversight is impossible without 
the participation of employees inside the system who know about 
activities of the agencies. This amendment will help ensure that all 
employees and contractors in the IC know where and how they should 
lawfully report potential incidents of waste, fraud, abuse, criminal 
conduct or whistleblower retaliation.
  The second amendment, offered with Rep. Alan Grayson (FL-09), would 
prohibit funds from being used to subvert or interfere with the 
integrity of a cryptographic standard proposed, developed, or adopted 
by National Institute of Standards and Technology. Last year, published 
reports indicated that NSA had slipped language into an encryption 
standard published by the National Institute of Standards and 
Technology that created a ``back door'' that NSA--as well as foreign 
intelligence services or malicious hackers--could exploit. The Holt/
Grayson amendment would prohibit that practice and passed unanimously. 
The last thing the NSA should be doing is weakening encryption 
standards. This amendment is one of many steps we need to take to 
prohibit such conduct in the future.
  The third amendment, offered by me and Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner, Jr. 
(WI-05), Zoe Lofgren (CA-19), Thomas Massie (KY-04), John Conyers, Jr. 
(MI-13), Ted Poe (TX-02), Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02), Jim Jordan (OH-04), 
Beto O'Rourke (TX-16), Justin Amash (MI-03), Jerrold Nadler (NY-10), 
Tom Petri (WI-6), Suzan DelBene (WA-01), Blake Farenthold (TX-27), G. 
K. Butterfield (NC-01), and Mark Sanford (SC-01) would end two abusive 
surveillance practices revealed in recent months.
  First, the amendment would prohibit any warrantless search of the so-
called ``702 databases''--the massive government databases, created by 
the NSA and first disclosed by Edward Snowden, that contain records of 
the emails and phone calls of millions of innocent U.S. citizens.
  One of the predictions I and others made in 2008 when Section 702 of 
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act became law was 
that NSA would misuse the law for the ``reverse targeting'' of 
Americans' communications while collecting against foreigners. As we 
now know, that is exactly what happened, and those communications--
billions of phone calls, emails, text messages and the like--sit on 
National Security Agency servers, available for search without a 
warrant. This amendment would bar the NSA from using any funds in this 
act to conduct any warrantless search of stored communications of 
Americans collected under Sec. 702 of FISA, thus protecting the privacy 
and Constitutional rights of all Americans.
  Second, the amendment would prohibit the NSA and Central Intelligence 
Agency CIA from installing ``backdoors''--such as malicious software or 
hardware--into commercially produced products. This provision was 
originally contained in my Surveillance State Repeal Act, H.R. 2818. 
Despite efforts by the House leadership to derail the amendment, it 
passed by a large bipartisan majority of 293-123.
  This amendment makes a loud and clear point: It's time to stop 
treating Americans as suspects first and citizens second.
  Unfortunately, despite the many good and important things contained 
in H.R. 4870, this bill continues to make the wrong choices for the 
wrong reasons. The overall spending would be almost $600 billion, a 
level that is impossible to justify in terms of the threats to the U.S. 
or in terms of spending by other countries, including potential 
adversaries. This bill would spend another $10 billion on a failed 
missile defense system that has not been, and will not be, ever be 
viable. The so-called ``overseas contingency operations'' fund--the 
money that fuels the war in Afghanistan and our combat activities 
elsewhere in the world--is set at nearly $80 billion dollars, and a 
large slice of that money will be used to continue an American military 
presence into 2015 and possibly beyond. It includes hundreds of 
millions of dollars for research on a new nuclear bomber design. And 
taking the prize for defense-related corporate welfare is the 
beleaguered F-35 program. Congressional Quarterly reports that the full 
cost of the program may exceed $1.5 trillion dollars over its lifetime. 
That is more than we will spend on the entire federal government in the 
coming year. There are vastly cheaper alternatives that would still 
provide the United States with a first-rate modern fighter-bomber. 
Instead, this bill throws still more good money after bad.
  I am not comfortable with vast sums of money this bill will waste on 
weapons we don't need and wars we should not be fighting. But I am also 
not comfortable allowing the National Security Agency to continue 
collecting and exploiting the communications of tens of millions of 
innocent Americans. Accordingly, it is with mixed feelings I oppose 
passage of this bill and I urge my colleagues to do likewise.

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