A discussion on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act recently took place on CNN’s “State of the Union,” where Rand Paul claimed that both the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader are “apologists” when it comes to the intelligence community.
Paul explained, “I think the intelligence community and their apologists which are Speaker Ryan and Leader McConnell they want to give enormous power to the intelligence communities and I think there’s too much power. This program is supposed to let us spy on foreigners in foreign lands when a foreigner talks to an American they get caught up in the database.”
He continued, “If the president calls a foreign leader he’s in the database. If I call a foreign leader, I’m in the database. If you’re a businessman or woman and you call foreigners you may be in the database. If you’re a journalist and you send an e-mail, and you type in the words Al Baghdadi, and you type that in, you’re in the database. We have this enormous database. Your name can be typed in or my name without a warrant. Keep the program but get a warrant if you want to search an American’s name and this I think the vast majority of Americans would support if they knew the issue.”
