As Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, took to the Senate floor in a
filibuster-like speech on Wednesday against reauthorizing the Patriot Act, GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas argued for the law's renewal.
The Patriot Act expires at the end of the month, and Republicans are divided over reinstituting it. Paul is the most vocal of the camp that says it invades the privacy of Americans by collecting phone metadata.
Cotton told
The Washington Examiner that those fears are unfounded. The only thing collected is information already held by phone companies, such as numbers called and duration of the calls, he said.
Cotton, an Iraq War veteran with a law degree, took to the Senate floor ahead of Paul to make his case.
"I disagree with Rand on both points, the constitutionality and the effectiveness," Cotton told his colleagues.
"First, the constitutionality: The Supreme Court passed on this a long time ago. There's no reasonable expectation of privacy in call data. Again, not the content of calls, not even the personally identifiable information about calls, but the call data — the two numbers called, the date and time of the call, and the duration of the call, because we willfully turn it over to our telecom provider."
Cotton told the Examiner that the public's perception of what data is collected is colored by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, whom Cotton called a "traitor" on
CNN on Wednesday.
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