[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 6787]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 STATE SECRETS VS. FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

  (Mr. POE of Texas asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, when I went to the Soviet Union in the 
1980s, the Communist leaders told me that they believed in and had a 
free press and they also had free speech. However, I also learned that 
Soviet law prohibited these freedoms when they jeopardized state 
secrets--or national security, as we call it in America. The state-
secret provision was so broad the Soviet press and speech were gagged 
and shackled. They certainly were not free.
  Now we learn that our Department of Justice improperly seized without 
notice phone records of over 100 Associated Press journalists--all in 
the name of national security concerns.
  To me, this is a clear violation of the spirit and letter of the 
First Amendment. These actions border on the Soviet method of 
legalizing these freedoms but never allowing them. So it's time to 
revisit U.S. law and require in all cases judicial review where these 
types of records are seized.
  We cannot allow our government to arbitrarily abolish the First 
Amendment in the name of ``state secrets.''
  And that's just the way it is.

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