The just-passed USA Freedom Act will harm law enforcement efforts to stop terrorists inside the United States, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra tells
Newsmax TV.
"At one point in time we got all of this information in one place," Hoekstra told "Newsmax Prime" on Wednesday.
Under the now-expired Patriot Act, the government collected telephone metadata in bulk and was able to access it with permission of the FISA courts. Now, that information will be held by more than 1,400 telephone companies, and the government will have to request the information.
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"We'd identify a bad person in Afghanistan ... we might get a phone number, we'd track that phone number, and then we'd find out that this phone number maybe called into the United States," Hoekstra said. "That would then trigger an effort to get a court order to track who that number called and if we got more information you go to the next step and you would try to get content."
The new method will be a much slower process and may not yield the same kind of sophisticated coordinates for tracking, he said. "It hurts to lose this capability."
It is even questionable whether telephone companies can be compelled to provide the information on request, intelligence and national defense expert Clare Lopez added.
"In that sense it will harm collection and our ability to keep track of individual jihadis," she said.
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