The head of the NSA just undercut Rubio’s claims at debate

Republican presidential candidate Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL) tried to score national security points off his rivals over their support for ending the government’s bulk collection of phone metadata, suggesting that the country lost “a valuable tool” in its fight against terrorism. But the legislation that ended the National Security Agency’s mass storage of phone records did not leave counterterrorism officials in the lurch. In fact, during the GOP debate, as Sen Rubio was attacking Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) over his vote for the USA Freedom Act, NSA Director Michael Rogers was telling a group of industry and intelligence officials that the new program “is working well so far.”

So what did the legislation change? Rather than the NSA gathering from phone companies each day millions of records about Americans’ phone calls -- the vast majority of whom are not suspected of terrorism activity -- the agency must now obtain a court’s permission to obtain data on each phone number it suspects of links to a terrorist group. Whether the new program, which is only three weeks old, will work better than the old is an open question. A presidentially appointed commission and an independent executive-branch privacy watchdog concluded that the bulk collection program did not thwart a single terrorist plot. Still, the GOP debate revealed a split in the party over government surveillance tools.