Ironically, the loudest voices that contradict Rubio come from within the NSA itself, as The Daily Beast reported when the USA Freedom Act first became law. Intelligence officials said that the records system the government had to maintain was expensive and cumbersome, and didn’t contribute many leads on terrorists. Most damningly, the database helped prevent few — if any — attacks.

“People should understand that more isn’t always better,” said GOP Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, 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.”

But that hasn’t stopped Rubio from using the law to paint a very scary picture of an intelligence agency flying blind, during a recent interview on CBS.

There, 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.”