[国会纪录卷161，69号（2015年5月7日星期四）] [参议院] [页面S2708-S2712“NSA反恐计划McConnell先生。主席女士，自违法行为的非法泄露，我们的反恐计划绘制了扭曲的描绘了如何通过利用我们的情报界无法讨论分类活动来进行这些计划的开展和监督。所以你有什么努力表征我们的NSA计划，以及进行他们的官员无法讨论分类活动。所以他们显然处于劣势。自2001年9月11日以来，FISA在美国安全的安全方面对美国安全起见至关重要。根据中央情报局介绍，这些当局在十年前已经到达了，他们可能会 - 可能 - 已经阻止了9/11。这些工具不仅让我们安全，没有一份事件 - 不是一个故意滥用他们的事件。NSA由我们政府的行政，立法和司法部门监督。他们没有在那里奔波。NSA由我们政府的立法，行政和司法部门监督。 The employees of NSA are highly trained, supervised, and tested. The expiring provisions of FISA are ideally suited for the terrorist threats we face in 2015. These provisions work together to protect us from foreign terrorists abroad who use social and other media to conspire and eventually plan attacks inside the United States. ISIL uses Facebook, uses Twitter, its online magazine, and other social media platforms to contact and eventually radicalize recruits online. If our intelligence community cannot connect the dots of information, we cannot stop this determined enemy from launching attacks. Under section 215 authority, the NSA can find connections--find connections--from known terrorists overseas and connect that to potential terrorists in the United States. But the NSA cannot query the database, which consists of call data records such as the number calling, the number called, and the duration, without a court order. Let me say that again. NSA cannot query the database, which consists of call data records such as number calling, the number called, and the duration, without a court order. Under section 215, the NSA cannot listen to phone calls of Americans at all. Under section 215, the NSA cannot listen to the phone calls of Americans at all. Despite the value of the section 215 program and the rigorous safeguards that govern it, critics of the program either want to do away with it or make it much more difficult to use. Many of them are proposing a bill--the USA FREEDOM Act--that they say will keep us safe while protecting our privacy. It will do neither. It will neither keep us safe nor protect our privacy. It will make us more vulnerable and it risks compromising our privacy. The USA FREEDOM Act would replace section 215 with an untested, untried, and more cumbersome system. It would not end bulk collection of call data. Instead, it would have untrained--untrained--corporate employees with uncertain supervision and protocols do the collecting. So it switches this responsibility from the NSA, with total oversight, to corporate employees with uncertain supervision and protocols. They get to do the collecting. It would establish a wall between the NSA analysts and the data they are trying to analyze. At best, the new system envisioned by the USA FREEDOM Act would be more cumbersome and time consuming to use when speed and agility are absolutely crucial. At worst, it will not work at all because there is no requirement in the legislation that the telecoms hold the data for any length of time. Put differently, section 215 helped us find the needle in a haystack, but under the USA FREEDOM Act, there may not be a haystack to look through at all. In short, the opponents of America's counterterror programs would rather trust telecommunication companies to hold this data and search it on behalf of our government. These companies have no programs, no training or tools to search the databases they would need to create, and if that isn't bad enough, we would have to pay them to do it. The taxpayers would have to pay them to do it. In addition to making us less safe, the USA FREEDOM Act would make our privacy less secure. The section 215 program is subject to rigorous controls and strict oversight. Only a limited number of intelligence professionals have access to the data. There are strict limits on when and for what purpose they can access the data. Their access to the data is closely supervised with numerous--numerous--levels of review. These safeguards will not apply to the untried and novel system under the USA FREEDOM Act, and rather than storing the information securely at NSA, the information would be held by private companies instead. There was an excellent editorial today in the Wall Street Journal pointing out the challenges we face. It was entitled the ``Snowden Blindfold Act.'' The ``Snowden Blindfold Act'' was the headline in the Wall Street Journal today. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of that article. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: [From the Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2015] The Snowden Blindfold Act Congress moves to weaken antiterror surveillance while France expands it. At least one of the gunmen who shot up a Texas free speech event on Sunday was known to the FBI as a potentially violent radical and was convicted in 2011 on a terror-related charge. The Islamic State claimed credit for this domestic attack, albeit an unproven connection. So it is strange that Congress is moving to weaken U.S. surveillance defenses against the likes of shooters Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi. Two years after the leaks from Edward Snowden's stolen dossier, a liberal-conservative coalition is close to passing a bill that would curtail the programs the National Security Agency has employed in some form for two decades. Adding to this political strangeness, France of all places is on the verge of modernizing and expanding its own surveillance capabilities for the era of burner cell phones, encrypted emails and mass online jihadist propaganda. The Patriot Act expires at the end of the month, and a fragile House-negotiated compromise on reauthorization would end NSA sweeps of telephone metadata--the date, time stamps and duration of calls. The content of those calls isn't collected without a separate warrant. The measure also includes mostly cosmetic nuisance changes such as a panel of outside amicus lawyers to advise the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that supervises and approves NSA activities. But the metadata eulogies are premature before what ought to be a sturdy debate in the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced a ``clean'' extension of current law as a base bill that the chamber will open to amendments later this month. The Senate narrowly defeated a bill similar to the House measure last year, and we hope it does so again. Senators should think carefully about the value of metadata collection, and not only because the technical details of the House bill are still being parsed by security experts. In January 2014, President Obama [[Page S2709]] tried to suppress the Snowden wildfire by pronouncing the end of ``bulk metadata program as it currently exists,'' via executive order. Civil libertarians rejoiced. Yet NSA transparency disclosures show the FISC court approved 170 search applications of the database in the same calendar year. Presumably the NSA continued to analyze metadata--despite pro forma White House opposition--because these details provide intelligence that is useful for uncovering plots, preventing attacks and otherwise safeguarding the country. The NSA must demonstrate to FISC judges a ``reasonable, articulable suspicion'' to gain approval for each ``selector,'' or search query. In other words, there is little invasion of privacy because the searches are narrow. The NSA isn't even using automated algorithms to reveal suspicious patterns the way that credit card companies and retailers mine consumer data every day. The NSA's 170 metadata searches involved merely 160 foreign targets and 227 known or presumed U.S. citizens. There is still no evidence that the data have been abused. The Supreme Court has held since Smith v. Maryland in 1979 that the Constitution provides no guarantee of metadata privacy. Domestic police and prosecutors in routine criminal investigations enjoy more warrantless access to metadata well beyond even the NSA status quo. The House bill pretends not to undermine intelligence collection by requiring telecom and tech companies to retain metadata business records. The NSA could then request these documents with FISC consent or unilaterally in an emergency. But assembling this information retroactively may be too slow in a true crisis--in return for little or no added privacy protection. After the hacking breaches at Sony, Target and a string of health insurers, Americans may reasonably wonder if their data are safer fragmented across many private third- party repositories. The Members of Congress who know the most about intelligence know all this, but they say that ending metadata collection is the price of blocking a political stampede that might also kill more important provisions such as Section 702 that authorizes foreign-to-foreign wiretaps. That might have been true immediately after the Snowden heist, but it may not be true after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and in Texas by Islamic State-inspired jihadists. Those shootings show that surveillance is more crucial than ever to prevent mass murder on U.S. soil by homegrown or foreign radicals. The French understand this, which is why they are widening their intelligence reach. No prevention can ever be perfect. But the House measure is a deliberate effort to know less and blind U.S. spooks to potentially relevant information. This self-imposed fog may be politically satisfying now, but deadly if there is another attack. Mr. McCONNELL. Finally, I would like to ask the senior Senator from North Carolina, who is the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, the following question: Why was it necessary to enact the provisions of the PATRIOT Act after the attacks of 9/11/2001, and why are they relevant today given the threat we face from ISIL and Al Qaeda? The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina. Mr. BURR. Madam President, I appreciate the question the leader has asked, and, also, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with my Republican colleagues. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. BURR. The leader raises a great question, and it is really the purpose for which section 215 was created. It is the reason the NSA looked at ways to effectively get in front of threats that take us back to 9/11 and the attacks. As we reacted, through our law enforcement tools within the United States, we used an instrument called a national security letter. They produced a national security letter. They had to go to the telecoms and ask that they search their systems for this information. The leader alluded to the fact that many looking back to pre-9/11 said that had we had the tools we have today, we might have stopped this attack. But over a series of years, Congress, the executive branch, the Justice Department, and our intelligence community worked to refine the tools we thought could effectively be used to get in front of a terrorist attack. That brings us to where we are today. Over those years, we created section 215, the ability to use bulk data. What is bulk data? Bulk data is storing telephone numbers--we have no idea to whom they belong--that are foreign and domestic. The whole basis behind this program is that as a cell phone is picked up in Syria and we look at the phone numbers that phone talked to, if it is someone in the United States, we would like to know that--at least law enforcement would like to know it--so we can understand if there is a threat against us here in the homeland or somewhere else in the world. Section 215 allows the NSA to collect, in bulk, telephone numbers with no identifier on them. We couldn't tell you who that American might be. And if for a reason they believe they need to look at that number because of an Executive order from the President, they go to a judge, and the judge is the one who gives them permission to search or query that data. If, in fact, they find a number that connects with one of a known terrorist, they have to go back to the court and prove there is reason for them to know whose number that is and the duration of time of the conversation. Further information requires further judicial action. Why are we here today? Because this expires on May 31. Some would suggest it is time to do away with it. Over the same period of time, we added something the American people have been very close to. It is called the TSA. Every time we go to an airport, we go through a security mechanism. Americans have never complained about it. Why? Because we know that when we get on the airplane, there is a high degree of likelihood that there is not a terrorist, a bomb, or some type of weapon that is going to be used against us. The leader said there has not been a single instance of a breach of privacy. Yet, those who suggest we need to change this do it 100 percent on the fact that privacy has been invaded. Let me say to all my colleagues, to the public, and to both sides of the Hill, today every American now has a discount grocery card on their key chain. They go and buy groceries and they proudly scan that card because it gets them a discount, it gets them coupons, it gets them a gas reduction. Here are the facts: Your grocery store collects 10 times the amount of data that the NSA ever thought about collecting on you. There is a big difference between the NSA and your grocery store: The NSA doesn't sell data; your grocery store does. From the data they collect, they could do a psychological profile on an individual. They could tell you how old they are, what their health is, where they live, how often they shop, therefore when they work. We are not in the business of doing that. They are. But I don't hear anybody complaining about the grocery stores' discount card because you get a discount, so you are willing to do that. What we haven't shared with the American people is, what do you get through this program? You get the safety and security of knowing we are doing everything we possibly can to identify a terrorist and the act and to stop it before it happens. So we are here today with a choice. The choice is whether we are going to reauthorize this program, which has been very effective, with the same conditions the President has in place--you have to go to a judge--and with important controls on privacy by professionals with rules, or whether we are going to roll it back to the telecoms. Make no mistake about it--the compromise legislation rolls us back to the same thing we were doing pre-9/11. So whether we let it expire or we reauthorize it, those are the two choices because this compromise bill actually forces it back to telecoms--very cumbersome, time-consuming, and, I would say, fraught with privacy issues, as the leader pointed out. It is my choice to continue the program because the program has worked. NSA only has less than three dozen people who have the authority to look at this data. I will bet there would be more people in every telecom company who are authorized to search data. Let me suggest this to my colleagues: If their argument is valid, then they should be on the floor with a similar bill eliminating the TSA. I am not sure anybody invades my privacy any more than the TSA process. When I go through, they x ray me, they look at my luggage. In some cases, they stop me and wand me and, in some cases, hand-check me. I am not sure there are any more blatant privacy concerns than that. But they are not in here suggesting we do away with TSA because they know the public understands the safety TSA provides to aviation. Our big mistake is we haven't been out here sharing with the American people why it has been so long since there has been an attack. We were [[Page S2710]] lucky this week in Garland, TX--lucky because 40-some Texas law enforcement officers happened to be at a museum, and everybody there was carrying. We are not going to be lucky every time. I remind my colleagues and the public, in the same week, ISIL went on social media networks and said: America, don't think that you have got this in your rearview mirror. There are over 70 terrorists that we have in America in 15 States, and it is a matter of time before it happens. Why in the world would we think about rolling back the tools that are the only tools that put us post-9/11 versus pre-9/11? The threat is greater today domestically and around the world than it has ever been, and the argument we will be consumed with is whether we do away with tools that have been effective for law enforcement to protect America. I would suggest that we reauthorize this bill for 5.5 years as is and that we make the same commitment to the American people we do when we reauthorize and fund the TSA: No matter where you are, we have controls. We are going to keep America safe. We are not going to let it revert back to where we are susceptible to another 9/11. With that, I turn to Senator Cotton, my distinguished colleague from Arkansas, and ask whether he agrees that the collection of telephone and call data does not raise any reasonable expectations of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. Mr. COTTON. Madam President, I thank the Senator from North Carolina, and I appreciate his work and the majority leader's work on this critical issue. I have been working hand in glove with them all along. I would say the answer to the question is, no, this does not raise any reasonable concern about privacy. In fact, the program does not collect any content. It does not surveil any phone call. It doesn't even include any personally identifiable information. I have spent hours with the intelligence officers and the FBI agents who are responsible for administering these programs--not merely the general counsels or the directors of these agencies but the men and women who administer them. I have asked them what they think poses a greater risk to their privacy--the discount grocery card the Senator from North Carolina mentioned or the fact that e-commerce Web sites have their name, address, credit card number, and personal history? And to a person, every one of them said a greater threat to their privacy is commercial marketing practices, not this program. The program has been approved 40 times by 15 different independent Federal judges based on 36 years of Supreme Court precedent and has been approved by two Presidents of both parties. If President Obama wanted to end the program tomorrow, he could, but he hasn't. That is because this program is lawful, it is faithful to the Constitution, it is smothered with safeguards against abuse, and it is needed to fight a rising terrorist threat that we face today. In fact, those threats today are greater than they were on 9/11. And that is not my opinion; that is the testimony of this administration's senior intelligence officials. The rise of Al Qaeda affiliates in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and the broader Middle East illustrates the metastasis of Al Qaeda following its retreat from Afghanistan. These groups are larger and more spread out than their predecessors. They are also more technologically and operationally savvy, developing new, nonmetallic bombs, recruiting westerners, and using the Internet to spread their hatred. They even publish ``how to'' manuals for becoming a successful terrorist at home. Of course, there is the Islamic State--the Obama-described ``JV team''--which has cut the heads off of innocent Americans, is torturing and murdering Christians and other religious minorities, and has sadistically burned people alive. More than 20,000 foreigners have gone to Syria and Iraq to join this enemy. Some have returned to their home countries, including the United States, some have remained in their home countries, becoming more radicalized and ready to inflict harm against Americans. We don't have to look any further than this past week, when two Islamic State-inspired jihadists decided to open fire in Texas. Press reports indicate that one of the attackers was in contact with an ISIS supporter currently located in Somalia. This conduct illustrates why this program is so important. It helps close the gap that exists between foreign intelligence gathering and stopping attacks here at home. This is the gap that contributed in part to our failure to stop the 9/11 attacks. There are also open source reports of ISIS cells in Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, California, and Michigan. As a member of the Intelligence Committee, I receive regular briefings on such threats, and I invite all my colleagues to receive these briefings if they doubt that the wolves are at the door or even in our country. This highlights one challenge of this debate: Most of the information surrounding the plots and the programs is classified. The intelligence community has been very accommodating in providing classified briefings to Members of the Senate and the Congress. The issue, though, is often getting Members to attend or to visit with the agencies. That is why I believe the Senate may have to enter a closed session as we debate these programs, so that Members are not woefully ignorant of the threats America faces. Under consideration in the House and proposed in the Senate is the so-called USA FREEDOM Act, which will eliminate the essential intelligence this program collects. Proponents of the bill claim that it provides alternative ways for the intelligence community to obtain critical information needed to stop terrorist attacks and that it doesn't compromise our counterterror efforts. But let me be clear. This is wrong. The alternatives to the current program do not come close to offering the capabilities we now have that enable us to protect Americans. One alternative offered by opponents is to have phone companies retain control of cell data and provide the NSA only the data responsive to searches phone companies would run on the agency's behalf. This isn't technologically feasible. At the request of the President's own Director of National Intelligence, the independent National Research Council examined this proposal, and its experts concluded that the technology does not currently exist that would enable a system spread among different carriers to replace the capabilities of the current NSA metadata program. Any such system would create holes in our ability to identify terrorist connections. First, phone companies don't store the data for longer than 180 days and oftentimes for much shorter periods, and nothing in the USA FREEDOM Act requires them to store it any longer. The current NSA program, however, stores data for 5 years, which allows the NSA to discover potential terrorist links during that time period. A system that keeps data with multiple carriers that store their data for much shorter time periods is close to useless in discovering terrorist network and sleeper cells, many of which lie in wait for years before launching an attack. Second, a system that tries to search multiple carriers and then collects and unifies their responses is cumbersome and time-consuming. In many investigations, the loss of valuable minutes, hours, and days may mean the difference between stopping an attack or seeing it succeed. Third, data stored with phone companies rather than the NSA is more vulnerable to hackers who would seek to abuse queries of the stored metadata. Fourth, the costs are unknown, and the American people will bear them--either as taxpayers if the telecom companies ask to be reimbursed or as consumers as the companies pass along the costs on your phone bill, perhaps as an NSA collection fee. Fifth, to those people who say that this is technologically feasible and that we can easily execute it, I would remind you that this is the Federal Government that brought you healthcare.gov. A second alternative offered is to pay a third-party contractor or quasi-private entity to store data and run the program. I would argue that this is untested and unworkable. First, the proposal would also require an indefinite stream of taxpayer dollars to fund it. [[Page S2711]] Second, the private entity may be subject to civil litigation discovery orders as it may hold information relevant to cases, which would expose Americans' data to judicial proceedings with no connection to national security and without the security and privacy protections in place today. Third, a new organization will create the need for heavy security, top-secret clearances for employees, and strong congressional oversight. As more resources are devoted to such an entity, what we end up with is a reconstituted NSA program but at additional cost to taxpayers and greater threats to privacy. As I mentioned, I have taken the opportunity in recent months to go and visit the men and women who work at the NSA and FBI. I can tell you all that they are fine Americans with the highest character. I spent hours with the very small number of men and women at Fort Meade who are allowed to search this data. I would ask how many critics of the program have actually done that. Let's examine in detail how these men and women search this data. An independent Federal court regularly approves NSA's authority to collect and store the data in the first place. But for these men and women to even look at the data, it must go through a multistep process that includes approval by four different entities at the NSA, numerous attorneys at the Department of Justice, and those very same judges who sit on that court. Even if a search request is granted, not just anyone at the NSA can access the data; access is limited to this small group of men and women, all of whom undergo regular background checks, drug tests, and are subject to regular polygraphs, many of whom are military veterans. To prevent abuse of the program in retrospect, searches of the data are automatically recorded and regularly audited by both the inspector general and the Department of Justice, with strict penalties for anyone found to have committed abuse. Moreover, I, the Senator from North Carolina, and other members of the intelligence committees of both Houses of this Congress participate in these reviews. This is a robust and layered set of protections for Americans, their privacy, and these protections would not exist under the proposed USA FREEDOM Act. There are also protections that almost definitely will not be adopted by private telecom providers, which some wrongly suggest might retain exclusive control of this data. These multiple safeguards are why to date these programs have a sterling record, with no verified instances of intentional abuse, not a single one. In conclusion, in the wake of the traitorous Snowden disclosures, Senator Chambliss and Senator Feinstein showed great leadership when they came together to defend these programs as both legal and effective. As Senator Feinstein wrote when she was chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to end this program will substantially increase the risk of another catastrophic attack in the United States. That is a proposition with which I wholeheartedly agree. I now see my colleague from the Judiciary Committee on the floor. He is a former U.S. attorney and State attorney general, and I wonder if he agrees that this program is both constitutional and does not differ in substantial ways from the traditional tools prosecutors can use against criminals while also providing adequate safeguards to American privacy. Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, that is an important question. First, I would like to thank the Senator for volunteering to serve in the forces of the United States to protect the security of our country and the Middle East and dangerous areas. We do need to protect our national security. We lost almost 3,000 people on 9/11. The Nation came together. I was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, and we evaluated what to do about it. We worked together in a bipartisan way and in a virtually unanimous agreement passed the PATRIOT Act to try to help us be more effective in dealing with international terrorism. What I have to tell you is what we were facing. Many people were shocked to see the improper obstacles that were placed in the way of our intelligence community as they sought to try to figure out how to identify and capture people who wanted to do harm to America. It was stunning. There was a wall between the CIA, which did the foreign intelligence, and the FBI. They could not say to the FBI: We have intelligence that this person might be a terrorist. The FBI has jurisdiction within the United States. That wall was eliminated when we developed these intelligence tools. And we did other things in an overwhelmingly bipartisan way. As a person who spent 15 years as a prosecutor, I would say there is nothing in this act that alters the fundamental principles of what powers investigators have to investigate crime in America. A county attorney can issue a subpoena from any county in America-- and they do every day by the hundreds of thousands--including subpoenas to phone companies for telephone toll records. Those toll records have the name, the address, and the phone numbers called and how many minutes. What is maintained in this system basically is just numbers. Not only can a county attorney, who is a lawyer, but also a drug enforcement agent and an IRS agent can issue an administrative subpoena on the basis that there is information in telephone toll records regarding John Doe that are relevant to the investigation they are conducting. They can get that information. It is done by law, and there is a written document, but that is the way it is done every day in America. There does not have to be a court order to get those records. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of subpoenas for telephone toll records. In every murder case, virtually every robbery case, every big drug case, the prosecutor wants to use those toll records to show the connection between the criminals. It is extremely valuable for a jury. This is part of daily law practice in America. To say that the NSA analysts have to have a court order before they can obtain a telephone toll record is contrary to everything that happens every day in America. I am absolutely amazed that the President has gone further than the law requires and is requiring some form of court order. Apparently, this bill would go even further, this FREEDOM Act. It is not necessary. You do not get the communications. All you get is--the person may be a terrorist in Yemen, and they are making phone calls to the United States, and you check to see what those numbers are and who they may have called. You might identify a cell that is inside the United States that it is on the verge of having another 9/11, hijacking another airplane to blow up the Capitol. I mean, this is real life. I think we only had a couple hundred queries. I think that is awfully low. One reason is, I am sure, we have such a burden on it. I would say, let's not overreact on this. Please, let's not overreact on this. Former Attorney General Mukasey, a former Federal judge himself, has really pushed back on this, and he believes it is the wrong kind of thing for us to be doing at this time. This is what he said: To impose such a burden on the NSA as the price of simply running a number through a database that includes neither the content of calls nor even the identity of the callers is perverse. The president said that this step may be dispensed with only in a ``true emergency,'' as if events unfold to a musical score with a crescendo to tell us when a ``true emergency'' is at hand. He was talking about the additional requirements the President put on it. One more thing. This is the way the system works and has worked for the last 50 years--40 years at least. A crime occurs. A prosecutor or the DEA agent investigates. They issue a subpoena to the local phone company that has these telephone toll records--the same thing you get in the mail--and they send them in response to the subpoena. They send those documents. They maintain those records. Now the computer systems are more sophisticated. There are more phone calls than ever. The numbers are by the tens of millions, probably almost billions of calls. So they are reducing the number that they are maintaining in their computers--I believe Senator Cotton said it was 18 months. Maybe [[Page S2712]] they abandon or they wipe out all these records. Well, an investigation into terrorism may want to go back 5 years. The government downloads the records, they maintain them in this secure system, and they are accessible just as they had been before but actually with less information than the local police get when they issue a subpoena. I believe this would be a big mistake. Senator Burr. Mr. BURR. I thank the Senator from Alabama. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent for 5 additional minutes on the majority side and 5 additional minutes on the minority side. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. BURR. Madam President, I am very curious to hear what my colleague Senator Rubio has to say and whether he is in agreement with what we have said on the floor to this point. Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I think my colleagues have made an excellent point today in outlining all the details of how this program works. Let me back up and point out why we are even having this debate, other than the fact that it is expiring. It is because the perception has been created--including by political figures who serve in this Chamber--that the U.S. Government is listening to your phone calls or going through your bills as a matter of course. That is absolutely categorically false. The next time that any politician--Senator, Congressman--talking head, whoever it may be, stands up and says ``The U.S. Government is listening to your phone calls or going through your phone records,'' they are lying. It is not true, except for some very isolated instances--in the hundreds--of individuals for whom there is reasonable suspicion that they could have links to terrorism. Those of us in this culture in our society are often accused of having a short attention span. We forget that less than a year ago, Russian separatists shot down a commercial airliner armed by the Russians. Maybe even the Russians themselves did it. We forget that it was not long ago that Assad was using chemical weapons to slaughter people in Syria. The world moves on. What we should never forget is what happened here on the 11th of September of the year 2001. There are a number of seminal moments in American history that people always remember. They remember when President Kennedy was assassinated. Everyone in this room remembers where they were and what they were doing on that morning of the 11th of September of the year 2001 when the World Trade Center was attacked and the subsequent attacks happened. Here is the truth. If this program had existed before 9/11, it is quite possible we would have known that 9/11 hijacker Khalid Al Mihdhar was living in San Diego and was making phone calls to an Al Qaeda safe house in Yemen. There is no guarantee we would have known. There is no way we can go back in time and prove it. But there is a probability we would have; therefore, there is a probability American lives could have been saved. This program works as follows: If the intelligence agencies of the United States believe there is an individual who is involved in terrorist activity--a reasonable belief--and that individual might be communicating with people as part of a plot, they have to get an order that allows them access to their phone bill. The phone bill basically tells you when they called, what number they called, and how long the call was. Why does that matter? Because if I know that subject X is an individual who is involved in terrorism, of course I want to know whom they are calling. I would not be as interested in the calls to Pizza Hut or the local pharmacy, but I would be interested in calls overseas or calls to other people because they could be part of the plot as well. That is why this is such a valuable tool. My colleagues have already pointed out that if the IRS wants your phone bill, they just have to issue a subpoena. If virtually every agency--any agency of American Government--if your local police department wants your phone bill--in fact, if you are involved in a proceeding in a civil litigation and they want access to your phone bill because it is relevant to the case, they can just get a subpoena. It is part of the record. The intelligence agencies actually have to go through a number of hoops and hurdles, and that is fine. That is appropriate because these are very powerful agencies. I will further add that the people who are raising hysteria--what is the problem we are solving here? There is not one single documented case, not one single documented case--there is not one single case that has been brought to us as an example of how this program is being abused. Show me the story. Give the name to the world. Show us who this individual is who is going out there and seizing the phone records of Americans improperly. There is not one example of that--not one. And if there is, that individual should be fired, prosecuted, and put in jail. The solution is not to get rid of a program at a time when we know the risk of homegrown violent extremism is the highest it has ever been. We used to be worried about a foreigner coming to the United States and carrying out an attack, and then we were worried about an American traveling abroad and coming back and carrying out an attack. Now we are worried about people who may never leave here, who are radicalized online and carry out an attack. This is not theoretical. Just last weekend two individuals who were inspired by ISIS tried to carry out an attack in the State of Texas. One day--I hope that I am wrong--there will be an attack that is successful. The first question out of everyone's mouth will be: Why didn't we know about it? And the answer better not be because this Congress failed to authorize a program that might have helped us know about it. These people are not playing games. They don't go on these Web sites and say the things they say for purposes of aggrandizement. This is a serious threat, and I hope we reauthorize this bill. Mr. BURR. Madam President, I thank my colleagues for their participation, and I thank my colleagues on the other side of the aisle for their accommodation. I will conclude by saying that in the very near future this Congress will be presented two choices: to reauthorize a program that works or to roll back our tools to pre-9/11. I don't believe that is what the American people want, and I don't believe that is what Members of Congress want. I urge my colleagues to become educated on what this program is, what it does, and more importantly, how effective it has been implemented. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico. [...]