Jeb Bush is scratching his head over the kids these days and all their “privacy” nonsense.
“We do protect our civil liberties, but this is a hugely important program to use these technologies to keep us safe,” he said, referring to the NSA’s phone data collection, during his much-buzzed-about foreign policy remarks at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on Wednesday.
“For the life of me I don’t understand, the debate has gotten off-track,” he said.
Bush characterized the controversial phone record program as “responsible intelligence gathering and analysis,” insisting that surveillance “contributes to an awareness of potential terror cells and interdiction efforts on a global scale.”
Bush is a likely 2016 presidential candidate, meaning it’s probably just a matter of time before Rand Paul trolls him again over these remarks. Surveillance is expected to be a source of party infighting in the primary: Both Paul and Ted Cruz oppose the NSA spying on Americans, while Marco Rubio has supported permanently enshrining NSA spying in law.
