Ben Cline Asks Witness If It's A Security Risk To Require A Warrant To Search Americans' Communications

Forbes Breaking News

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA) spoke about requiring a warrant to search the communications of Americans.

Transcript

00:00Mr. Klein. Mr. Klein. Thank you. Mr. Kiko, if the government can't articulate how many Americans

00:06are being surveilled under Section 702, how can it claim the program is narrowly tailored to

00:11national security threats? If they can't articulate it, then they, I won't say what they're doing.

00:18It's certainly not telling the truth. Is it really a national security risk to require a warrant to

00:24search the communications of Americans, especially if there's probable cause? No, it's not a national

00:29security risk. Everybody, we collect all this incidental information and you should have a

00:35warrant to search it. That's not why it was collected. It was incidental. And as other

00:41witnesses said, there's other ways to check on this information without like metadata and stuff

00:48like that. So that's my opinion. Mr. Cerniasky, you've spoken about how government overreach and

00:56tech policy. So how do we justify allowing the government to query vast databases of Americans'

01:01private communications without a warrant, especially when those queries are increasingly used in routine

01:05criminal investigations?

01:07To me? Yeah. Thank you for the question, Representative. I don't think you can justify

01:11it. At the end of the day, when people discover that the government has violated their trust by

01:16violating their Fourth Amendment rights to search these vast databases for their communications,

01:19that that undermines their faith and trust in a key institution that they believe is supposed to be

01:24protecting them. And it's quite chilling for them to realize that that weapon is being turned inward

01:29and being leveraged against them to spy on them when they've not necessarily done anything wrong.

01:35I'm going to ask the ACLU witness whose name I can't read on that. Can you give us an update on the

01:41status of the decision? Was it appealed from the Second Circuit?

01:45So the decision was a district court decision. The defendant lost on separate grounds. And so it

01:53would actually be the defendant who has to appeal it, not the government. The government can't actually

01:57appeal that decision. And I'm not sure what the defendant plans on doing.

02:00The gentleman's time has expired. The chair recognizes the gentleman from New York, Mr. Golden.

02:05Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do look forward to having this debate as someone who spent 10 years

02:10writing, drafting, and getting...

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