Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate in the Michigan race for the US Senate, launched a new ad blitz on Tuesday attacking his opponent Mike Rogers for helping expand the government’s mass surveillance powers while he was in Congress.
The paid digital video and billboard ads mark a final-stretch effort ahead of the midterm elections to pin bipartisan voter anxieties about privacy concerns, recently spurred by Flock cameras, onto Rogers.
The video from the El-Sayed campaign intersperses clips of Rogers praising the Patriot Act of 2001, which, in addition to expanding law enforcement powers, also allowed the collection of Americans' telephone data without a warrant after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Rogers’ career is dotted with support for government surveillance over the years, including in 2011, when Rogers introduced a bill that would have allowed companies to share emails with the National Security Agency. (In 2014, however, Rogers introduced a bill that would have ended “bulk collection of metadata,” though it never made it to a vote.)
“You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated,” the ad repeatedly quotes Rogers as saying in 2013, when he served as chair of the House Intelligence committee.
The video also includes Rogers’ remarks extolling surveillance by companies like Google.
In addition to the video, the El-Sayed campaign will run billboards with the tagline “Mike Rogers is watching you” in parts of Michigan, according to the El-Sayed campaign.
In tying Rogers to surveillance concerns, El-Sayed is leaning into one of the major technology-related complaints from voters this cycle as he battles in a Senate race rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report.
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