Thank you. Wrote. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for holding an open and public hearing. Myself withto align the senators. Everyone in this room and other senators know i represent the nationals 38 and he. People get up every day. We have seen the revelations of eric snowden and we are not here to debate whether he was a traitor or a whistleblower. But i will say this. I am deeply disturbed that, while i support the need to review the to 15 project, to actually even examine it, i do not see the continual immunization of the nationals cured agency, whether in the media or in other forms. National security agency, whether in the media or in other forms. People do a whole host of other things to keep america safe. Eric snowden had his time. He gets an hour on tv. Row from brian williams. We ought to say to the National Security staff, that while we looked at the persecution a la the of other issues here, that we do not i have always maintained our must be constitutional, legal, authorized, and believe youo you are doing your work using the q 15 program, you believe there are cost to shuttle programs, legal, authorized, and did you deem them to be necessary . Thank you to the for the messages. Yes, to answer your question. I believe it was constitutionally authorized and done within the legal and procedural constraints under which we operate it. I believe every investigation has shown it to be the case. Yes. I concur. I do believe the oversight of that program is expensive. We will not discuss the constitutionality there and ive urged the administration to find any x the dated expedited procedure to find what program is constitutional. I presume the usa act is constitutional that i will go to questions of the sets the. I will go to the nsa and the guy. Do you believe what we did under 215 was necessary . You have now reviewed this usa freedom act. Do you believe they say what you deem necessary to protect the people of the United States of america, that this will enable and that your job will be able to have the choice to continue to do what you think is necessary to protect the people . Yes, i do. I believe it helps to mitigate the gap that sanctioned 215 fill,ation is enacted to which is the x journal with the u. S. Nexus, detecting that an avoiding a repeat of the 9 11 sort of attack where you had folks outside of united aids who were talking to people inside the United States and we could not identify them. The program was designed to address that. Hr 361 does as well. We allow them do the job. Yes. I concur. Use ours the fbi to authorities. It strikes the right allens. Right balance. The Telephone Company i am not sure. We find a Telephone Company. Who is to say does all this come under the of ready of the fcc . To an extent. In other words, will we say they release all of these things and we will tell the fcc to keep an eye on it . You have to break it up in different pieces. The Telephone Companies already hold the data. We are not doing anything new. There are already under the control of how they hold and how they do with it and things of that nature. What will remain subject of oversight is how we to acquireious tools some of that data, to use some of that data. Restrictions on how much can be looked at, what it can be disseminated or, how long you can keep it, those are the kinds of things and what the standards are for getting it. Those are the and wharton questions. A lot of oversight by the executive ranch, the justice department, the a the eye, the nsa, ig offices, there is a civic provision to do reviews. Still be robust reporting by congress on what is done. Lets thank you. Life enqueue. Thank you. Thank you. It seems to me were doing something unnecessary and unpredictable here, which might , butthe public feel better which would be not good for National Sick erie. That is what our job is. It seems to me we are taking a program the president determined as a legal, and important, counterterrorism tool a program that has audit, tax, andns, judicial other pressure systems built and. Program currently in a highly , operated byon highly change professionals who have taken an oath to defend the constitution, and who have lived up to that oath, and we are shutting it down to move the storage of that for intelligence sectors, to a private system that does not yet it this. What is the sense of that . I could and will ask you to describe the various queries and , to protectexternal american privacy as it relates. Let me ask three things. On top of that. Can you describe it ivc oriented training that has to be undergone for 215 databases . Or the training internal rules and external audit designed to protect privacy taken seriously at the nsa . The answer to that is yes. If this is the case, asked in why we should be moving the process to a new and system that is a free enter rises them which does that no matter how they testify, not want to do this. We went through that in i said. Thats why we have to do amid the immunity. They did not want to do it. It is not their training. It is not their practice. It is not the nature of their workforce. It is a high concentration. 22 people are making serious. Ecisions it is a private sector operation and it is huge. Not everybody is verizon and eight. There are a lot of small Telephone Companies that have to do the same ring. I do not give make sense. How do you compare the security pop possibilities of the system it does not yet exist, which i promise you is not welcome by those who would be asked to do it, to prevent to replace a system working well, which the public is naturally. Uspicious about 39 rating , butublic never trust us if were doing something for National Security which is trustworthy, by trustworthy evil, who were trained, and they in ae their lives to this, particular place, why cash it out . Thank you for the questions. The Current System involves a host of safeguards, to close it starts, policy procedural safe guards him a training safeguards, and safeguards around eliminating the number of people allowed to ask if the database. Very restrictive, completely audited, and with software in place that prevent them from making an erroneous query that has not been authorized i the court. Record in that arena is outstanding in that regard in privacy. Iotecting think those were necessary for two reasons. It is the government with the data, as opposed to someone with who is not the government. Closelyeed to circumscribed those. The second reason is because the data was aggregated. Under the new program, the data is not aggregated or held by the government. Telephone companies are holding data they already possess today or there is no Additional Data they are holding except queries from us that have it to civic number of interest. We will work with the countries to put protections into place so our influence in a particular number does not leak out and provide warning to potential terrorist. The Companies Already have this data, so the implications are just in this regard. It is a large order for an untested series of companies. The art and the struggle to get people trained, to have them locked in on their duty as they go to work every single day, ashley those 22, but nsa in general, where nobody has complained about the private violations. Everyone is worried about what might happen. Everyone is always worried about what might happen here in that it has not happened. It all comes to an end at the end of next year. We will have to look at it again. Profitmaking, and i have dealt with telecommunications a long time. They say many things. They do not do many things. When we started the program, which was really controversial home of a road me letters controversial, they wrote me letters. It ended up in the Supreme Court and they all lost. I would just assume not give them the chance. I am sorry it has taken along. No robbie there it enqueue. Enqueue. Like many of my colleagues, i want to see our intelligence collection was strength to provide more trans and the, torove ivc, and also increase oversight. At the same time, as many of us have it best, we need to ensure we have the tools necessary to help her tech our nation from terrorist attacks. I want to followup on some of the questions that have been raised by senator rockefeller. Under the usa freedom act, the private sector would retain phone records rather than nsa. That is a major change. I believe it was mr. Cole who pointed out, yes, but they are already saving these data. They are doing so for a completely different purpose than what we are contemplating. Essentially, they are doing so for billing purposes for the most part. Some experts warned us that data held in the private sector are at much greater risk of being breached by hackers, being for purposesused other than that for which they were collected, were being missed used by personnel than if the data were continued to be held by federal entities. If only to look at what has year, wherethe past the Security Firm called 2013 the year of the megabreach. That had million and their personal information compromised in the target case. There was a very compelling ,eport put out by our colleague senator rockefeller, the chairman of the commerce that found private Companies Already collect, mind, and sell as many as 75,000 individual data points on each consumer. There was a recent report by the fcc that found that Companies Group virtually every american by race, hobby, medical, conditions. Things we would all think were private. There was a story a couple of years ago by the New York Times that described to father of a teenager learned she was pregnant because he kept seeing all of these flyers for chris and baby clothes coming to her in the mail. Thosetrast to all of searches the nsa database, are limited to a very few, highly trained personnel. Limitedngle search is him audited, and logged. There are have the coal safeguards. Technical safeguards. You cannot do a search that will not work here at compliance issues have to be reported to the fisa court and congress. My question for you is, how are we going to ensure that these same kind of robust protections, even greater that many of us want to see, are in place if we are going to have the data scattered across all of these companies . I just do not see how you will datae the privacy of that and is it not inevitable that many more people will have access to the data than they do under the current is him . System . Thank you. The data is and has been in the possession of the Telephone Company since they started giving records however many decades ago that was good what we did at nsa was get a periodic seat of the data, which we then aggregated and held in a database. Describedings you were held on a copy nsa held on it database. The billing records existed before and will continue to this regardless of the future of the 215 program and all those to hacking and that sort of thing, the Telephone Companies you with every day. There will notis be a government held aggregated that of telephone numbers we apply all of those protections to. We make the database go away and then rely on the billing the telephone him pennies have held for decades and continue to hold or their own purposes and we query against the. Those. Dont you think there is a difference between the Telephone Companies holding this data for billing purposes, versus holding it and knowing the government pacific to them selectors, which will make them. About why the information is being written vested . You will have to go across a large number of companies to find the information here it is teams to me to inevitably involve more people. That is very different from the kind of. Ata dump you were receiving i just want to make sure, as we privacy,g to increase strengthen the safeguards, that we do not end up doing the opposite by having this data, these data, held by the private sector. Now,w they are held there but they are held for an entirely different reason. Asking thosebe private sector employees to do the queries that are now done by an extremely limited classified number. Ofextremely limited number federal employees. I understand. We will work with the Telephone Companies to ensure our queries are kept in a secure fashion by people who have gone through the clearance process the government runs, to ensure they are protected the right way. Also, if i may, in Traditional Law enforcement, we are regularly going to phone companies with subpoenas and things of that nature to acquire some of their billing records and him of the various and kinds of information. We go to them for pin registers on the lawn was meant i. We work with phone companies to do wiretaps on the Law Enforcement side. There is a long history of working with phone companies and using their data and fist roadies from a Law Enforcement perspective that has given us confidence in that regard. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I have a question or two in light of the recent revelation that the senator referenced that the nsa has in using a loophole of the fisa Amendment Act to search for americans private medications without a warrant. What some people have dubbed the search loop old, and i think it was for target reform medications. The government based on that letter believes it has the authority to deliberately search phone also were emailed of specific americans and to circumvent the traditional protections hearing the five with amendment. I would ask mr. Legend and old, do you believe the government should be allowed to conduct searches of his mission on u. S. Citizens, collected under sections of an o2, without having to seek a warrant for that information . The way it has been viewed and has an interpreted is the first issue is whether you are legally off arise to collect the information in the first race. This is what sections of an o2 allows us to do. We target only nonus or since and only people believed to be out by the united date. Those are the strict limits or there will be communications at involve americans that are incidental. They are not targeted. You end up collecting incidental information youre the authorization under section 7022 let the information trumps the profession of the americans who would typically be afforded under the for the moment . Process. Is a several you are first allowed to protect the information. It is like a criminal law wired that. You collect calls a make from other people, who may not even target of your invest in addition. But you will collect those calls as well because they involve the person whose phone you are tapping. If you are legally permitted to collect the information, then you have got it and then the session is whether or not you can access that information, used information we legally possess, and this is what is different from the root im in the is that is going to search for the american, the u. S. Or since records, which we are not doing. We get those in deadly. We have them legally under 702 and in the russian is whether or not it look through and those records because they are already illegally hours illegally hours. We have not done out to the them illegally in any shape or form. Legitimate from investigation, to further legitimate antiterrorism investigations and things of that nature am a we certainly have restrictions we try to waste internally on those and we try to make sure they are users on we and we try to make sure they are only used or specific possess already legally it. You have made the Governments Division very clear and i appreciate that. It is something we should probably look at, given the at forave is opportunity reform right now. I want to get to my idle restaurant. Were running short on time already. I want to go back to the issue raised early on and hr 3361ons around how to find a specific selection term. Looking back at the old draft from the house, it could set a term used uniquely to describe a person, and be, or account. That is a pretty tight version, andhe new election term means a just read terms such as, and there is a laundry list of items there. I have validation every time i see such as, because it is up to the risen reading to decide whether the next thing they imagine is are the poor is not. Under your interpretation of the definition, passed by the house, what are some records secluded collection on a civic election term . Any bowl collection. What is currently being authorized by the court of the collection of all records, and internet metadata records, indiscriminately, that would be certainly,hibited. If you went to collect all the telephone records within a certain zip code, indiscriminately, that would be prohibited. Focus. Nt is to limit and it is to prohibit indiscriminate collection and only authorized focus and intentional collections for ace this the purpose. The reason that such as is in there is that it is very difficult to predict what you may come across that you might need, that will for you ample involve a larger number of records and just one specific telephone call to once the of the person that once the of a kind. Some of the examples i gave in my opening damon. You have somebody who you know will build an improvised explosive device using ball bearings and fertilizer or you may want to go to the stores in the area that sell ball bearings and fertilizer. It is broader than a pacific item, but it is much less than every store in america, regardless, and then sort through it. If you know a terrorist suspect stated a particular hotel for a couple of nights, but you do not know who it was only you might get the hotel fusses records for those couple of nights, to see who all the guests were at the hotel to then cross ref is that with other information to identify who the terrorist was. It is focused and discriminating. It is not indiscriminate. But it is larger than a specific identity of a pacific person. So, we need to have enough room to do an investigation that is effective and, we need to have enough restrictions so we are not indiscriminately collecting records in bulk. If there are better ways to define it, and it is a tough one to define, but if there are better ways to define it come a we are interested in working on that. We think this doesnt. I appreciate your willingness to work on this. The chair brought up the issue early into the discussion. I would end this by