Don’t tell the bad guys…

Don’t tell the bad guys, but the bulk collection of phone data under the Patriot Act has expired.

The danger of brinksmanship is that sometimes you go over the brink. And that’s what happened in the Senate last night. A debate that was timed was timed to pass a revision of the Patriot Act just before it expired blew up when Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky refused to play along with fellow Republicans.

“How much time is remaining,” asked Senator John McCain as Paul continued to speak at length in opposition to the act.

But as hard as Senator McCain and others tried, Senator Paul would not be silenced:

“We are not collecting the information of spies, we are not collecting the information of terrorists, we are collecting all American citizens’ records all of the time,” Paul said.

But as of midnight, all that stopped. Senator Paul’s critics say that’s what he wanted &#8212 this was all about him being known as the crusader for privacy who single-handedly stopped the Patriot Act. Senator Dan Coats of Indiana says privacy has nothing to do with it.

“To people out there that think that big government is in their bedroom, big government is storing this and quote ‘listening to all your phone calls,’ is a bunch of hokum,” Coats said. “There has not been one act of abuse of this program.”

I will say there was a certain irony in hearing Republicans asking people to trust the government.

But in the end the revised bill appears to have the votes. And the Senate, in a day or two, is expected to make sure that phone data gets stored one way or the other.

In the meantime, the government servers are shutdown, so you are at least temporarily free to make those calls you’ve been putting off. Just don’t tell the bad guys.