MASSIEFLIX

Massie: Intelligence Agencies Will Use These Loopholes to Spy on Americans

Dec 11, 2025 · 6:13 surveillancefisafourth-amendmentfloor-speech

Floor warning on FISA reauthorization: the intelligence agencies will use every loophole to spy on Americans. Same fight as 2015.

Original by Office of Rep. Thomas Massie on YouTube ↗ · Is this yours? Claim credit →

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  1. Gentle lady yields back and we'll we'll recognize gentle from Kentucky. >> Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for having the hearing on this. Um, you know, I've been working on this for
  2. over a decade with my colleague, Mrs. Zolofrren, and I was ecstatic a decade ago when we got an amendment passed to require a warrant, but somehow that got
  3. stripped out, and it's kind of like Lucy and the football and Charlie Brown. We get so close or we think we've won and then it gets pulled away. Um, and I I'll
  4. talk a little bit about the elephant in the room. One of our colleagues here, you who used to be for FISA reform is now the speaker of the house and cast the deciding vote uh against FISA reform
  5. last Congress. Uh, we don't want to talk about that too much, but I'm going to bring it up because when he was asked why did he change his position, he said he learned some stuff in a skiff. Well,
  6. the skiff is like the magic room where they go change your mind. The problem with his story is I spent three hours in the skiff with him and when we pressed the CIA director and the director of
  7. national intelligence and the head of the FBI, all of them were in the skiff. Give us one example where you couldn't have solved the crime or you couldn't
  8. have prevented some mass casualty event because of a warrant requirement. They could not give us a single example. The only person in that room who had a
  9. decent argument about anything was a FISA judge who said, "Ah, you're going to need more skiffs somewhere if we're going to review these if you're we're
  10. going to have to review warrants." And so it became a cost issue, but I thought that was kind of lame. You know, it's going to cost some money to follow the
  11. Constitution. Okay, what's it going to cost? Um, one of the things that Zo Lofkin reminded me of is there all these
  12. sort of loopholes where we're afraid if we do get our FISA reform, the the intelligence agencies are going to use these loopholes to spy on Americans. And
  13. the one I want to ask you all about today, well, there's actually three of them, but one of them is Executive Order 123. And I and I see Miss uh Guyine
  14. shaking her head. So I'll ask her what should we be concerned about 12 triple 3 and what could we do about that executive order? >> Yeah, absolutely.
  15. >> Yeah. So let me explain a little bit as a general matter. FISA applies when the government is collecting information inside the United States or from US
  16. companies. Um, if the government is collecting information overseas, it usually is relying on a claim of inherent uh authority as governed by
  17. executive order 123 and various other uh executive policies. And this is a critical distinction uh because there are um almost no legislative protections
  18. or guard rails for executive order 123 and there is no judicial oversight. Now this distinction between collecting here and collecting there might have made
  19. sense in 1978. Uh because you know collection inside the US usually meant collecting on Americans and collecting overseas usually meant collecting on
  20. foreigners overseas. Um as we all know with the changes in technology that has completely changed communications other sensitive information is routed and
  21. stored all over the world and in fact the fact that foreigners communications were being stored by US service providers in this country and therefore
  22. the government would have needed to get a warrant for those before 702 is one of the reasons the government pushed to modernize FISA with 702. They just
  23. didn't address the other half of the problem which is that Americans communications are routed and stored overseas in ways that can in some circumstances remove them from the
  24. protections of FISA for example when the government collects collects information in bulk overseas and it's inevitably pulling in Americans communications. So,
  25. Americans communications are uh acquired incidentally. They are acquired as part of bulk collection under EO23. And the only safeguards in place are
  26. those that the executive j branch has chosen to put in place. It will not shock you that those rules and procedures are much more lack. >> This isn't the answer I wanted. I wanted
  27. you to tell me we shouldn't be concerned about executive order 123. >> Sorry, you called in the wrong witness. Um, another loophole that we've
  28. identified in the Weaponization Committee was the Financial Privacy Act of 1978, which is one of those bills that did the opposite of what it was
  29. supposed what it the name of it was. It created a loophole that allows the government to get bank records without any warrants or anything. Is anybody
  30. familiar with this? Yeah. Yes, I am. I mean I would say there's the concern overarching concern I have is you have 1978 you have 1981 on 123
  31. we didn't have the ability to collect the data that we do today nor the access to it. Um it was a very different government that we were talking about
  32. back then when those executive orders came out. >> So that may need updated as well you think? Absolutely it does because we've
  33. we identified where they've been using it recently and a lot of this stuff actually comes through whistleblowers. This just in closing, I'm disappointed
  34. that our committee didn't find the Arctic frost the spying on the senators and it wasn't a we're responsible for oversight. We couldn't even find them
  35. spying on us. It was a whistleblower. And so, um, I think we need to tighten up our oversight over these committees
  36. that, >> well, we did we did find that they were [sighs] spying on the speaker of the house and members of this this well, at least one member we know of, but this >> committ and just one more thing before
  37. close. I I know we got some I would prefer to fix the law for everybody, not for members of Congress. I totally agree. >> But one of our colleagues was very vocal
  38. about making sure it was fixed for members of Congress. But the fix was to report the spying to the speaker of the house um and maybe a couple chairmans of
  39. committees. Why not report it to the person that was spied on, the member of Congress? That's my concern. I yield back. That's why we that's why we did the non-disclosure order non-op fairness
  40. act that we passed out of this committee to help with that in that regard. Are the

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