From Congressional Representative Rush Holt (12th District New Jersey):

From Congressional Representative Rush Holt (12th District New Jersey):

Over the last decade, multiple individuals in the executive branch — and a few in Congress, including me — have warned repeatedly about how the radical over-reach of these programs was undermining the very foundations of our republic, even as the mass collection activities were not making us any safer. And that is the most important point: If investigators are following the Fourth Amendment probable cause guidelines, they will do a better job. Undisciplined fishing expeditions have not made us safer. Someone who recognized this fact and tried to prevent such excesses, former NSA executive Thomas Drake, was rewarded for his patriotic whistle-blowing by being prosecuted by the Department of Justice.
In Drake’s case, he and a team of NSA colleagues had actually developed a relatively cheap, very effective and privacy-compliant way of getting the kind of terrorism-related data our government needed to fight groups like al-Qaida.
Unfortunately, his discovery angered NSA’s senior management, which had invested huge sums of taxpayer money in a system that did not work and was ultimately canceled. Drake and his colleagues reported all of this to then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Porter Goss — who did exactly nothing.
Drake and his colleagues then did what we tell government employees with concerns about waste, fraud and abuse to do in these cases: report it to the Pentagon’s Inspector General. Drake did, the IG validated his claims … and then proceeded to turn him and his colleagues over to the Justice Department on bogus charges. In the end, the criminal case against him was dropped but his career in government was destroyed.
Soon, I will introduce legislation that would repeal the laws that brought us our current “surveillance state”: the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act.
My bill would restore the probable cause-based warrant requirement for any surveillance against an American citizen being proposed on the basis of an alleged threat to the nation. And it would, for the first time, provide genuine legal protections for the Thomas Drakes of the world.
If we hope to restore and preserve the republic that Hamilton, Patrick Henry and other Founders risked their lives to create, we must end the industrial-scale surveillance and perpetual war mentality that has been foisted on the American people in the name of “national security.”

You can lend your support to Representative Rush Holt’s soon to be introduced legislation by contacting him here.