Senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio isn't going to let an opportunity to attack his rivals pass, no matter the substance of his attack. Rubio says fellow senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz deliberately weakened U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and thus national security by voting for domestic surveillance reforms:
"At least two of my colleagues in the Senate aspiring to be president, Sen. Cruz in particular, have voted to weaken the U.S. intelligence program," Mr., Rubio told a collection of corporate executives at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council annual meeting. "Weakening our intelligence-gathering capabilities leaves America vulnerable." […]
Mr. Rubio took the feud in another direction Monday by attacking the Texas senator for backing legislation Congress approved over the summer overhauling the NSA's collection of meta-data and restoring other pre-existing safeguards on Americans' personal communications that were changed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Mr. Cruz joined 23 fellow Republicans in supporting the legislation. Mr. Paul voted against it, but had offered an alternative measure that would have gone even further to impose new restrictions on American intelligence officials. […]
"We are vulnerable," Mr. Rubio said. "What happened in Paris could happen in a major American city at any moment, at any time."
Rubio is going to try to ride his self-proclaimed foreign policy expertise gleaned from sitting on the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees (never mind that he's missed half of those committee meetings). But as a member of the Intelligence Committee there are a few things he should know about our foreign and domestic intelligence capabilities.
Marcy Wheeler points out that the NSA has all the dragnet collection capabilities that it wants to have in the U.S. in the Middle East and Europe. And it did not, apparently, have warning of the Paris attacks despite that. What's more, "The French have their own dragnet. They already had permission to hold onto metadata, but after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, they expanded their ability to wiretap without court approval." The French didn't pick up this attack through their dragnet collection of metadata—which they were doing legally, by the way.
If Rubio actually did know more than anybody else in the race on intelligence, he would know all that. Of course, there's an outside chance he does know it, but is too fundamentally dishonest to let that knowledge get in the way of his presidential ambitions.