Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said on Tuesday that bulk metadata collection has failed to prevent terrorist attacks on American soil, and reiterated her support for encryption.
“All this metadata that we’ve been collecting as a result of the Patriot Act, we’ve … clearly missed the Tsarnaev brothers, we missed the San Bernardino couple,” Fiorina said during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom.”
“It means that we’re using, among other things, the wrong algorithms to search through that metadata,” Fiorina added. “There are companies out there that have been creating algorithms to discern patterns, and that’s what we’re missing.”
Fiorina began emphasizing the failures of the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program during the fifth Republican debate on Dec. 15. The program ended on Nov. 29. Some candidates, most notably Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., have argued the program’s expiration made America less safe, and made a promise to renew it central to their campaigns.
Fiorina has suggested the program never worked, and that government should collaborate with Silicon Valley in coming up with alternative solutions.
“Technology has moved on four and five generations since the Patriot Act,” Fiorina said. “Bureaucracies have not moved, but the terrorists have. And so we must engage the private sector now, in this war, just as the private sector was engaged during World War II.”
Fiorina also took a shot at Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton as she reiterated her support for encryption.
“You need a president in the oval office who actually understands technology. Encryption helps millions of Americans keep their credit records safe, for example,” Fiorina said.
During the third Democratic presidential debate on Saturday, Clinton said in response to a question about encryption, “I don’t know enough about the technology.” She added that she did not want any new laws to prevent encryption, but that she would like tech companies to find a way to break it on their own.
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“It doesn’t do anybody any good if terrorists can move toward encrypted communication that no law enforcement agency can break into before or after,” Clinton said.
