Update 12/17, 9:20pm EST: Cruz said he did not leak classified information and Burr said the whole thing was a misunderstanding—that no investigation was underway. According to Politico: "A source familiar with the situation said Burr wasn’t walking anything back because there was no investigation to begin with and suggested that his off-the-cuff comments in the Capitol merely got blown out of proportion. A spokeswoman for Burr declined to offer further explanation. Burr is one of the more humorous senators in the Capitol, but he rarely jokes about intelligence matters, which senators treat with great gravity."

Original Story:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr said Wednesday he was investigating if Texas Senator Ted Cruz released classified surveillance data at Tuesday's GOP presidential debate.

The probe concerns what Cruz said during a back-and-forth talk with Florida Senator Marco Rubio about the USA Freedom Act, which President Barack Obama signed in June. Cruz said that, under that law, "nearly 100 percent" of phone calling metadata can be surveilled with the new spy program compared with "20 percent to 30 percent" under the Patriot Act provisions that the USA Freedom Act replaced.

Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, said the committee's staff is looking into the statements.

"The question had been raised. Therefore I asked them to look at it and see if there was any validity to it," Burr told reporters in DC today. "It's not as clear as just reading what he said. We've got to search all sorts of media outlets to see if anyone had reported that number independently."

The issue concerns land lines versus mobile phone and Internet-based phones. Here's what Cruz said about the USA Freedom Act:

It strengthened the tools of national security and law enforcement to go after terrorists. It gave us greater tools and we are seeing those tools work right now in San Bernardino. And in particular, what it did is the prior program only covered a relatively narrow slice of phone calls. When you had a terrorist, you could only search a relatively narrow slice of numbers, primarily land lines. The USA Freedom Act expands that so now we have cell phones, now we have Internet phones, now we have the phones that terrorists are likely to use and the focus of law enforcement is on targeting the bad guys.

Rubio eventually responded. "I don’t think national television in front of 15 million people is the place to discuss classified information."

Under the Patriot Act snooping program, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosed that the nation's telecoms forwarded data to the NSA. That shared information included the phone numbers of both parties in calls, calling card numbers, and the length and time of the calls. The NSA kept a running database of that data, though the organization says it queried the data solely to combat terrorism and that one party of a call must be believed to have been overseas.

Cruz's statement mirrors leaks that mobile and VOIP phones may not have been included in the original spying program.

Under the USA Freedom Act, the bulk phone metadata stays with the telecoms and is being removed from the NSA's hands. The NSA can still access it with the secret FISA Court's blessing as long as the government asserts that it has a reasonable suspicion that the phone data of a target is relevant to a terror investigation and at least one party to the call is overseas. The Constitution's Fourth Amendment standard of probable cause still does not apply.