Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is throwing his support behind a push to preserve a controversial National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program in the wake of the Paris attacks.
The presidential candidate on Wednesday said he is backing legislation from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that allow the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. phone data to continue until 2017.
{mosads}“The Paris terrorist attacks remind us that no corner of the free world is safe from these savages, and it is our duty to defeat them by any means necessary,” Rubio said in a statement.
Rubio said the NSA reform legislation that passed earlier this year “left our intelligence community with fewer tools to protect the American people and needlessly created more vulnerabilities and gaps in information gathering used to prevent terrorist attacks at home and abroad.”
Congress approved The USA Freedom Act after a heated legislative debate. The law requires the NSA to shutter its bulk collection of metadata by Nov. 29 and develop a system to obtain more targeted information about phone calls from private companies.
Critics in the GOP and the intelligence community say the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday should prompt a reevaluation of the surveillance law.
In addition to continuing the bulk data collection, Cotton’s legislation would lock in two other provisions in the Patriot Act, including the authority to target “lone wolves” and to conduct roving surveillance of multiple unidentified devices used by the same target.
Rubio is locked in an increasingly bitter battle with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of his top rivals for the GOP nomination.
He criticized the Texas Republican earlier this month, saying that Cruz “voted to weaken U.S. intelligence programs.”
Cruz suggested that Rubio was trying to change the subject from his role in drafting a comprehensive immigration reform bill that conservatives rejected.