Via Gary Satnan on IPR facebook group:
King Statement on NSA Phone Records Program:
King Statement on NSA Phone Records Program
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Angus S. King, Jr. (I-ME), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released the following statement today:
“As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I intend to closely scrutinize the procedures and diligence of our government when it comes to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court orders, including those associated with phone records. I will also be asking tough questions about provisions included in the USA PATRIOT Act, especially including questions about whether the data necessary to protect us can be collected in a focused manner, and I will not vote to extend those provisions unless I am satisfied that procedures are in place to protect the rights of Americans. As we seek to prevent terrorists from killing our citizens, it is vital that we never infringe upon the blessings of liberty guaranteed to us in the Constitution.”
And:
Alarming and Absolutely Unacceptable
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today criticized a secret domestic surveillance program that swept up millions of telephone records on calls by Americans who were not suspected of any wrongdoing.
A court order demanding the records be turned over was obtained under a controversial interpretation of a provision in the so-called Patriot Act, which Sanders voted against when it was first enacted in 2001 and when it was reauthorized in 2006 and 2011.
“As one of the few members of Congress who consistently voted against the Patriot Act, I expressed concern at the time of passage that it gave the government far too much power to spy on innocent United State citizens and provided for very little oversight or disclosure. Unfortunately, what I said turned out to be exactly true.
“The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about. Congress must address this issue and protect the constitutional rights of the American people,” Sanders added.
“While we must aggressively pursue international terrorists and all of those who would do us harm, we must do it in a way that protects the Constitution and the civil liberties which make us proud to be Americans,” Sanders said.
The Obama administration did not dispute a report, first published yesterday by the Guardian, that a classified court order required Verizon to turn over massive phone records to the National Security Agency.