On Wednesday, in the first major policy speech of his White House run, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) laid out how he would defend the nation from “the threats facing America.”
Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, Rubio laid out what he dubbed “The Rubio Doctrine”: a plan that includes massively increasing military spending, reversing the new diplomatic breakthroughs with Cuba, and permanently extending the controversial domestic surveillance provisions in the 2001 Patriot Act.
“A strong military also means a strong intelligence community, equipped with all it needs to defend the homeland from extremism — both homegrown and foreign-trained,” he said. “Key to this will be permanently extending Section 215 of the Patriot Act. We cannot let politics cloud the importance of this issue. We must never find ourselves looking back after a terrorist attack and saying we could have done more to save American lives.”
The program he’s staunchly defending was recently found to be illegal by a high federal court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in early May that collecting the “metadata” of nearly every American’s phone calls — the numbers and duration of the calls — was not something Congress wanted to happen when they passed the Patriot Act in 2001. They said the government’s argument that all Americans’ phone calls are “relevant” to a terrorism investigation is “unprecedented and unwarranted,” noting: “Search warrants and document subpoenas typically seek the records of a particular individual or corporation under investigation.”
Rubio has repeatedly brushed off concerns that the programs violate privacy. “The government is not listening to your phone calls or recording them unless you are a terrorist or talking to a terrorist,” he wrote in a recent op-ed. “Internet search providers, Internet-based email accounts, credit card companies and membership discount cards used at the grocery store all collect far more personal information on Americans.”
But the court recently countered that the information the government is sweeping up can be personal and sensitive. “[M]etadata can reveal civil, political, or religious affiliations; they can also reveal an individual’s social status, or whether and when he or she is involved in intimate relationships.”
Rubio not only opposes efforts to reform and curtail domestic surveillance, he has called for making the controversial programs permanent.
He argued that “there is not a single documented case of abuse of this program.” But leaked government documents have shown otherwise. Not only did federal audits find that US intelligence agencies have broken their privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times since the program’s inception, some of these times have included willful abuse, such as agents spying on their spouses or ex-girlfriends. Additionally, investigations have found that the agencies massively overstated the programs’ value in thwarting terrorist attacks.
Rubio’s position pits him against many of his fellow Republicans, including some of his opponents in the upcoming presidential race. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) railed against domestic NSA surveillance in his campaign launch speech, calling it “un-American and a threat to our civil liberties” and promising to end it on the first day of his presidency.
In his own campaign kickoff, Ted Cruz told the stadium full of students: “Instead of a government that seizes your emails and your cell phones, imagine a federal government that protected the privacy rights of every American.”
Rubio’s stance on surveillance has also earned him reproach from influential conservative organizations like FreedomWorks, who wrote that his polices are “fundamentally inconsistent with liberty.”