“I know this, if God forbid there’s an attack tomorrow morning in another major U.S. city, the first question everyone is going to have is: Why didn’t we know about them, and how come we didn’t stop it? And the answer better not be: Because a tool we once had that could have allowed us to identify them is no longer available to us,” Rubio said Sunday on Fox.

“People should understand that more isn’t always better,” said Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who championed the USA Freedom Act in the House of Representatives. “Drowning our intelligence agents in endless records means we miss the most important pieces. We have seen this again and again. Remember the Boston bombings, the Paris attacks, and even the San Bernardino attacks happened with bulk collection in place.”

Rubio said the USA Freedom Act “took away the right to collect metadata, which means that we can now not access the phone records of individuals that we either suspect of being involved in terrorism or who carry out an attack to see who they were coordinating or talking to.”

The bill “did not take away the ‘right to collect metadata from terrorist suspects,’” Sensenbrenner told The Daily Beast. “It stopped the bulk collection of innocent Americans’ records and established an efficient process for obtaining records from suspects... USA FREEDOM simply requires the government to obtain a lawful order to access information from the phone companies.”

The USA Freedom Act also puts the onus of record keeping on telecommunications companies, eliminating the U.S. government's role in keeping a massive database of records.

Rubio said on Fox this week that there are a “large and significant number of companies that have already said, ‘We are either not going to collect records at all.’”

Asked which companies this might be, neither the Rubio campaign nor his Senate office responded.

“I know of no phone company that says they are not going to collect phone records—under FCC rules, companies must keep billing information for 18 months,” said Neema Singh Guliani, a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. “In fact, in many cases, companies keep phone records for longer than two years. T-Mobile, for example, has said that they keep records for seven to 10 years.”

“You can only see them up to two years to three years,” Rubio said.

“This is incorrect,” Guliani responded. The length of records would determine on how long the phone company was keeping records, he said: “The government would be able to obtain an order from the FISA court for any records that the phone company had related to the individuals that conducted the attack.”

Cato Institute policy analyst Patrick Eddington, who specializes in homeland security and civil liberties issues, added that “as the Director of National Intelligence noted in his testimony, anything over 18 months old is pretty much useless.”

Nope, PCLOB only addressed the concern of the public about the government having access to records, nothing about the legality or efficacy. The directors of the NSA, FBI, NI, CIA, and heads of the military branches have testified to the effectiveness of metadata in identifying and killing terrorists.

...[the metadata dragnet] lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value... As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program.

So...just like it was before the metadata collection. Yes, the Freedom Act took away the government's ability to collect metadata; now they have to go through telecom companies, who have no obligation to store any metadata. Metadata analysis is what was used to determine a link to terrorists, provide evidence to the FISA court for a warrant, and subsequently gain access to more tools like wiretaps. Now with the onus being on the government to provide proof before even having access to the metadata (which was anonymous and autonomously analyzed), it's barely effective. It's like asking cops to write speeding tickets without a radar gun.

Not even going to bother quoting the rest of the rebuttal. Of course telecom companies will hold billing data for a few years; billing data is not at all equivalent to the metadata needed to identify terrorist suspects. Unless these companies are going to hold call data, they're not collecting records. Rubio is correct.

There's no source, so we have no idea what Rubio is even referring to here.

3/10 article

More data =  more precision. It was an automated, autonomous process that benefited from larger pools of data.

Kupo

What if I told you

That the some fed knew about every Islamic plot to commit terror

They just couldn't act on them because their boss would tell them they're racist and send them to EO training again?