Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the self-proclaimed "serious" foreign policy guy in the Republican presidential primary race, appears to be taking a page from Dick Cheney and planting misinformation with the help of the AP in the interest of stoking fear and gaining votes. That's Marcy Wheeler's analysis anyway, of a push from Rubio on Sunday to go back to the bad old days of the surveillance state. Literally moments after a badly flawed AP article was published, Rubio's campaign was tweeting his statement that because of surveillance reforms that went into effect at the beginning of the month under the USA Freedom Act "we have less access to intelligence information than we did just days ago." As Wheeler says, bullpuckey.
The premise of the article, and Rubio's tweeted statement as well as assertions made on CNN's State of the Union, is that the "government's ability to review and analyze five years' worth of telephone records for the married couple blamed in the deadly shootings in California lapsed just four days earlier when the National Security Agency's controversial mass surveillance program was formally shut down."
But the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency that actually is investigating the attack, Wheeler points out "has their own databases and the ability to obtain records from phone and Internet companies directly going forward (and already had, given reports from Facebook, before this article was written)." They are not limited to Section 215—the telephone metadata collection dragnet that has been replaced by the USA Freedom Act—and in fact a government oversight board found that "the Section 215 program offers little unique value here, instead largely duplicating the FBI's own information-gathering efforts."
So the lead investigative agency in this attack already has access to—and has been accessing—information that the AP and Rubio misleadingly say can't be accessed because of reforms. Beyond that, the article suggests that, as Wheeler says, "the 'US government' can't get any records from NSA, which in turn suggests the only records of interest the NSA might have came from the Section 215 dragnet, which is of course nonsense." The NSA gets way more records from sources other than that dragnet, and shares them with the FBI. There's much more in Wheeler's fisking of the article, and it's worth a read. But she has another point mentioned in an aside:
Rubio's campaign immediately pointed to the article to make claims they know—or should, given that Rubio is on the Senate Intelligence Committee—to be false, relying on the AP article.
So is Rubio an intentional liar, or has his chronic absenteeism from his actual Senate job meant that he just hasn't done any of his homework on intelligence? Not that they're mutually exclusive options.
