[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 19621-19622]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Poe) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, it reads like a page out of George 
Orwell's ``1984:'' spies, secret courts, and searches of Americans 
without a warrant. It is clear: Big Brother is watching us.
  Most Americans may not be fully aware of what is taking place behind 
closed doors of government spy agencies, but the reality is our 
government is spying on ordinary, everyday Americans.
  How?
  Through an old piece of legislation, originally signed into law by 
President Carter in 1978, called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance 
Act, or FISA.
  FISA allows our government to spy on foreign agents, including 
terrorists, primarily overseas. The government collects all of this 
information and puts it into a database. If they want to use or search 
the database, they go to a secret court, and that court issues a secret 
warrant to search the database.
  This court operates behind closed doors and issues those secret 
warrants to go after--remember--bad guys overseas.
  As the subcommittee chairman of terrorism, I have no problem with our 
government going after terrorists who seek to harm Americans.
  What I do have a problem with, Mr. Speaker, is the government uses 
these databases that they seize and then looks in those databases about 
Americans and their activities, violating their Fourth Amendment rights 
because they don't have a warrant to go into these databases to look 
for Americans. Remember, they are searching for terrorists.
  Here is what happens: While seizing the communications of a suspected 
foreign agent--maybe an al-Qaida terrorist talking to another al-Qaida 
terrorist--the government, incidentally, picks up communications of 
American citizens. These communications may not have anything to do 
with terrorism.
  This data is kept. The government puts it in their database, and they 
say it is legal. This information on Americans was seized based on this 
secret warrant of foreigners issued by a FISA judge.
  Occasionally, the government then decides to go into this database 
that was inadvertently seized--as they call it--without a Fourth 
Amendment warrant on Americans, and checks to see how many times an 
American name, or other identifying information, comes up. If they find 
something, they use this data on the American citizen.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, they still don't have a warrant to search 
Americans' information, even if it was incidentally collected.
  They search this database to see, for example, if Bobby Oglethorpe is 
committing a crime in the United States, maybe having nothing to do 
with terrorism. Maybe it is a robbery, maybe it is an IRS fraud, maybe 
it violates other laws of the United States. But, remember, they are 
looking for that without a warrant.
  They seize the information, and, quite frankly, we don't know how 
many times they seize this information on Americans.
  Our Judiciary Committee has continually asked the intelligence 
community: How many times have you searched? They refuse to tell us how 
many searches and seizures there are on Americans in that database.
  Very suspicious, isn't it, Mr. Speaker?
  According to The Washington Post, 90 percent of the account holders, 
whose communications were collected, were not targets. The bad guys 
overseas, they were Americans: 90 percent of them.
  Nearly half of the surveillance files contained names, email 
addresses, and other details that the NSA marked as belonging to 
American citizens or residents.
  So, what information are they getting?
  They get communications, texts, and emails.
  Without a warrant, remember, secret courts issuing secret warrants, 
and they don't tell anybody about it.
  Under section 702 of the FISA legislation, this warrantless search of 
Americans is legal. But this, in my opinion, violates the U.S. 
Constitution.
  As a former judge, I am very concerned about the loss of our Fourth 
Amendment right of privacy in the United States, based on this 
unconstitutional law. The Fourth Amendment is sacred to this country 
and to the Founders who drafted it. It is up to Congress to uphold 
Americans' Fourth Amendment rights.

[[Page 19622]]

  Despite intense debate in the House Judiciary Committee, I am still 
concerned the House leadership is planning to reintroduce and 
reauthorize the FISA legislation and not have these reforms to protect 
Americans' privacy. A reauthorization of FISA with weak language only 
seeks to put Americans' privacy at stake and violates the U.S. 
Constitution.
  Any 702 reauthorization should simply require that if you want to 
look at the data that was incidentally seized on Americans, get a 
search warrant or stay out of that data; otherwise, it violates the 
Constitution.
  And that is just the way it is.

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