Thee worst terrorist group these days does a lot of its business in public. The Islamic State recruits and signals its followers on Twitter. This gives all of us the opportunity to play NSA and monitor communications from the group with cutting edge technology like Tweetdeck.

This is not to say that terrorists do not also have more clandestine ways of communicating. Al Qaeda, for example, developed an encrypted Internet-based communications system. U.S. officials have also warned that terrorists have changed how they communicate since some of the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

So it’s clear the proponents of government surveillance are exaggerating. But their opponents are grandstanding as well. Senator Rand Paul, the libertarian Republican running for president, has portrayed himself as a wrestler about to take on Obama and the security state. But even Paul acknowledges that the authorities he allowed to expire will be reauthorized soon enough in the USA Freedom Act. What’s more, while Paul has framed his fight as one with Obama, it was Obama that empaneled a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that concluded the bulk collection of metadata was unnecessary to stop terrorists.

It’s natural to wonder how genuine Paul’s interest in privacy is. Does his campaign — like almost all campaigns these days — buy cell phone data on voters?