http://www.nationalreview.com/node/418807/print Why National-Security Republicans Lost the Patriot Act Debate
By Andrew C. McCarthy — May 23, 2015
The NSA doesn’t even know your name.
But you probably don’t know that. It is amazing how little the public has learned from the debate the national-security Right has lost — not is losing but has lost — over the National Security Agency’s “metadata” program.
The information the NSA has collected in bulk from telecommunication-service providers does not include the names of telephone subscribers. They don’t know who you are. It does not include addresses. They don’t know where you are.
Most people still do not know this, which reflects the power of the “domestic spying” canard peddled by Rand Paul’s anti-government extremists and Baby-Boom lefties who apparently still think it’s 1974. The latter camp includes a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit federal appeals court in New York, whose ruling that the NSA program is illegal begins with this astonishing claim: “In the early 1970s, in a climate not altogether unlike today’s, the intelligence-gathering and surveillance activities of the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA came under public scrutiny.”
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