Rep. Mike Rogers has jumped on Michele Bachmann’s comparison of NSA bulk collection of call records to phone books:
There are “zero privacy violations” in the National Security Agency’s collection of phone records, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said Sunday on “Face the Nation,” just days after the chamber narrowly rejected a measure that would have stripped the agency of its assumed authority under the Patriot Act to collect records in bulk.
“There’s more information in a phone book than there is in this particular big pile of phone numbers that we used to close the gap – we, the intelligence services – close the gap that we saw didn’t allow us to catch someone from 9/11,” Rogers said.
“Remember, this came about after 9/11 when we found out afterward that terrorists that we knew about overseas had called somebody who was a terrorist but living in the United States or staying in the United States,” he continued. “He ended up being the person that got on an airplane and flew into the side of the Pentagon.”
Read more on CBS Face the Nation.
So Rogers ignores the significance of metadata and refuses to see that the very collection of bulk call records without reasonable suspicion that the targeted individuals have done something terrorism-related is in itself a privacy violation.