killed 12 people including eight americans. a preliminary investigation pointing to driver negligence and speed. prosecutors say the driver lost control of the bus before flipping it and hitting a tree. the passengers were traveling from a cruise ship to visit mayan ruins. more on this as we get information. i know all our colleagues on both sides of the aisle want to keep the government funded and tend to urgent priorities. i m confident we can work together to do that. bill: will they? the focus on the hill is keeping the government from shutting down. the republicans say they will argue the law allows the government to spy on other americans with the fisa law. rand paul has been a doubter on that law. welcome back here, good morning to you and a merry christmas. you look well. are you well now since i m doing better. i had a really difficult five
i hope the democrats won t shut the government down. laura: i want to play some sound for you. senator rand paul was on with us last hour talking with bill about why he could end up vote to shut down the government over fisa. i m never a fan of shutting down government. that s not my intention. i m a fan of defending the bill of rights. right now we have a spy program that spies on foreigners. ifm owe okay with that. it collects a lot of information on americans. they won t tell us how much. we think millions of phone calls and emails and internet searches are caught up in this huge database and it should not be used on americans without constitutional protections. laura: what do you think about that? here is the fact about this program. the data that senator paul alludes to has no identifiable information. there is no name or other identifiable source of information attached to any call. there is no content. so there is nobody listening in. there is no transcription or
collection of emails. so there is no invasion of people s privacy. but there is a court that says if there is a known terrorist that is interacting with an american on a regular basis, if you convince a judge there is sufficient reason to be suspicious of this, then you could begin to monitor those calls just as you can now if there is a criminal investigation. so i m in favor of extending the fisa provisions. this legislation by the way doesn t make it permanent but it would extend it and i would support that. laura: looks like you guys are standing in the same live shot position there within the last hour. you ll run into each other today. senator pat toomey. thank you so much for being with us today. bill: stay with us. white house press secretary sarah sanders is our guest live and a ton to talk about with her. that s coming up 20 minutes from now at 10:30 eastern time. stand by. laura: going to be a good hour.
which, by the way, is aimed at you. for the first time since edward snowden fled to russia the fisa law which enables the collection of america s private communications is up for congressional reauthorization. and congress seems poised to approve it quickly. should they. professor, thanks for coming on. thank you. tucker: so i think everyone agrees, essentially i think you want robust intelligence agencies defends you from foreign threats, which are real and are proliferating. so i think we need surveillance. i m just concerned because the bulk of the surveillance is of american citizens and i m not convinced the government does enough to separate them from the potential bad guys. well, you are 100 percent right. it s one of the most complicated problems that we have though tech technologically and legally. terrorism doesn t recognize national boundaries or national citizenship. so, when you want to surveil conversations of bad guys who live in yemen or iran or
security agency s targeting of foreigners outside the u.s. under section 702 of the fisa law. the fbi can query the nsa s 702 database to find u.s. citizen, phone number and email address but only under certain restrictions. at his final congressional appearance before being fired by president trump comey assured lawmakers that those provisions are strictly observed. the information that s in the 702 database has been lawfully collected, carefully overseen and checked, and our use of it is also appropriate and carefully overseen and checked. nobody gets access to the information that sits in the 702 database unless they have been trained correctly. yet, the fisa court found the fbi in recent years made 702 intel available to unauthorized individuals, including contractors and sometimes retained the data for too long. these are breeches of minimization, the practice of keeping to a minimum an agency s infringement of