mr. bennet: thank you, mr. president. i'm here tonight to discuss the supreme court vacancy caused by justice antonin scalia's death. first, i think it's important to reflect on justice scalia's life and profound contribution and profound influence on the court and our country. he was one of the largest serving justices in our nation's history and as far as i can tell, every single day he served he applied his considerable intellect, integrity and wit to the work before him. and although i disagreed with many of thinks decisions, i -- many of his decisions, i never doubted his commitment to the rule of law. he was a principled originalist. he was loyal to his country. by all accounts, including moving testimony from his children, he was devoted to his family and to his friends, including to justice ruth bader ginsburg, with whom he often disagreed. judge scalia's judicial philosophy was well understood when president reagan nominated him to the supreme court in 19 1986. many senators then opposed his judicial approach. bu

by my partner in the senate senator gardner and senator schatz, senator bennet, senator capito and my good friend senator king. mr. president, one thing regardless where people fall on this debate is that digital security tools are terribly important. encryption is essential to protecting our personal information, our financial information, our intellectual capital, our national security, and this is one issue in which the heads of law enforcement and the heads of the intelligence community as recently as two weeks ago, senator king and senator collins are on the intel committee, testified in public that encryption is here to stay and is extraordinarily porch. but we've seen -- important. but we've seen challenges around this technological innovation come very quickly. think about this. nearly 2,000 new applications are submitted to the app store every day. this is how quickly this world is changing. the majority of these applications that are added to that app store are actually produced overseas. two-thirds of these new apps use some level of encryption. i followed this both if the policy standpoint but also my