Hello and welcome to the NPR Politics podcast. It is time for our weekly roundup and we're

last week National Security and Terrorism were barely on the political radar. This week

as a result of the attacks in Paris, these issues are dominating the debate and this podcast

too. From surveillance policy to immigration, even the politics of Facebook profile pictures.

And then we will go to a little something we like to call can't let it go where we each

share a story that we just can't stop thinking about this week. But first you might want

to know who we are here in this little room. I am Tamer Keith. I'm an NPR White House

correspondent and I also cover the campaign. I'm Ron Elbing, Editor in Correspondent.

I'm Scott Detro, I cover tech and politics. I'm Sam Sanders, campaign reporter here at NPR.

And let's start with those attacks in Paris. Scott Detro, you've been reporting on sort

of a side angle on this, which is the issue of surveillance and that has really become

a campaign issue this week. It's become a campaign issue this week and it had been completely

MIA up until this point. And a terror attack will change that conversation. Marco Rubio was

the first to kind of make this an issue early this week. He was speaking at a forum and

he brought up a June Senate vote that will explain in a moment and said, this is something

we need to talk about on the campaign. At least two of my colleagues in the Senate

aspiring to the presidency, Senator Cruz in particular, have voted to weaken the US intelligence

programs just in the last month and a half. And the weakening of our intelligence gathering

capabilities leaves America vulnerable. So what Rubio is talking about is a June vote

to scale back the Patriot Act. This was probably the biggest significant legislative change

to come out of the whole Snowden thing. Now the phone companies keep that information,

the metadata from our phone records, who we're calling, when we're calling them, how

...