At a Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller was asked about the effectiveness of the Patriot Act’s Section 215, the section of law under which the government has required a Verizon subsidiary to turn over the metadata about calls made by all its subscribers. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the committee, asked Mueller if he could provide a number of terrorism cases where Section 215 had been “critical” to the intelligence and law enforcement community.
“I know we’re working through the list of numbers — or not numbers, the list of cases — and of those domestically I think it will be anywhere from 10 or 12 where 215 was important in some way, shape or form,” Mueller responded.
“Out of the billions of phone numbers that were collected,” Leahy replied.
“Yes, but let me go back to Sept. 11,” Mueller said, citing an argument he made at a hearing last week, that Section 215 could have helped prevent the 9/11 attack if its powers had been available to the government beforehand.
