Ted Cruz has launched a stinging attack on fellow Republicans who have demanded the return of mass telephone surveillance in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack.



The Texas senator, who is surging in the 2016 polls by running as the most conservative candidate in the race, has rejected the calls from many in his own party who believe the Paris and California attacks are grounds for a return to the controversial bulk data collection techniques revealed by Edward Snowden.

Demands have grown in recent days from national security hawks, but Cruz said the techniques outlawed during recent reforms of the National Security Agency had failed to detect the plotters behind the San Bernardino shooting.

As new information emerges from the FBI suggesting the husband and wife shooters were radicalised up to two years earlier and may have been plotting other attacks, Cruz argued that blanket surveillance had proven to be counter-productive in spotting potential Islamic extremists operating in the US.

“On the right, there are some who have called for resurrecting the government bulk data collection that existed under the Patriot Act [but] more data from millions of law abiding Americans is not always better data,” Cruz said, in a major national security speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

“Hoarding tens of billions of records of ordinary citizens did not stop Fort Hood, it didn’t stop Boston, it didn’t stop Chattanooga, it didn’t stop Garland and it failed to detect the San Bernardino plotters,” he added.



Cruz was a co-sponsor of the USA Freedom Act, which replaced lapsed authority under the Patriot Act and now forces authorities to demand specific data from phone companies instead of collecting all of it and storing it in government databases.



Though the reforms received widespread bipartisan support at the time they passed Congress and are supported by the White House, a backlash has grown in recent weeks, with figures such as CIA director John Brennan criticising “hand-wringing” over surveillance.

Kentucky senator Rand Paul – who has campaigned on libertarian grounds against the invasion of privacy of millions of Americans – has also attempted to hold the line in the face of the renewed criticism, accusing hawks such as presidential rival Chris Christie of demanding Americans “give up their liberty for a false sense of security”.

“What Snowden revealed is we were collecting all of Verizon’s records on all Americans,” Paul told MSNBC earlier this week. “I think it’s actually made us less safe because I think the haystack is so large that we’re getting lost in the haystack.”

But Paul has made little headway in the crowded Republican primary and the fresh support from Cruz, who recently overtook Donald Trump in polling in Iowa, threatens to catapult the libertarian issue back to the top of the party debate.

“When the focus of law enforcement and national security is on ordinary citizens rather than targeting the bad guy, we miss the bad guys while violating the constitutional rights of American citizens,” said Cruz on Thursday.

“Instead the bulk data programme was emblematic of the bureaucratic tendency to gather more not better information, which gives government tremendous opportunity for abuse,” he added.

“Like the fable of the scorpion and the frog, government will do what is in its nature: amass power at the expense of people.”

Both Cruz and Paul argue that their bill makes it easier for the NSA to target specific suspects.

“Under the old bulk data programme, all of us were presumed guilty at the outset and yet the universe of phone records that could be searched was materially smaller than under the USA Freedom Act,” said the Texas senator. “We should not shy away from smarter policies.”

His intervention came as politicians on both sides of Congress were receiving new classified security briefings on the San Bernardino shootings.