With the recent addition of Rand Paul to the 2016 GOP Candidate pool, I have been thinking a lot about issues that I agree and disagree with him on. One that came to mind that I certainly agree with him on is mass surveillance of innocent American’s via the National Security Agency (NSA). As a matter of fact it was one of the issues featured in his official candidate declaration on Tuesday of this past week when he stated that he would reverse the mass surveillance on innocent Americans by Executive Order if elected in 2016.

“The president created this vast dragnet by executive order. And as president on day one, I will immediately end this unconstitutional surveillance,” Paul, speaking before a raucous crowd in Kentucky, said. “I believe we can have liberty and security. And I will not compromise your liberty for a false sense of security, not now, not ever. “

As someone who grew up on Army posts across the world I understand the value of profiling and wish to high heaven that our present government could shed its PC ways and do what the Israeli’s have been doing since the 1970’s to protect their nation. Paul seems to get that and to be on board with the idea of seeking out those who would intend us harm by using rational means to screen them out based on prior incidents-like the recently convicted Boston Bomber.

He stood against the renewal of the surveillance portion of the Patriot Act due to what is known as Section 215 which allows the mass collection of phone metadata-which include the phone numbers called, the timestamps, call duration but not the actual content of a call.

Many have said that Paul is paranoid, much like his father who has been known to be on the loopier side of the Libertarian strain by saying things like “I would like to restore your right to drink raw milk anytime you like”. But is he? When across the globe, we see evidence of American companies spying on people?

Now we can add Facebook to the list of companies that have been spying only this time, they claim it was caused by a bug. As outlined in a blog posting on The Hill, Facebook claims that a “bug” made the site start to follow non-users. Say what?? Yes, you read that correctly.

“Facebook researchers have found “a bug” that caused it to track people, even if they had never visited its website, the social media giant acknowledged this week.

The bug caused the company to place cookies — a common way to track people’s browsing habits on the Web — on “some” people’s browsers, even if they had never visited Facebook.com to sign up for an account, the social media website’s European Public Policy Vice President Richard Allan wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. However, the tracking was “inadvertent,” and Facebook has begun to work on ironing out its code, Allan claimed. The constant tracking was first noticed by a team tasked by Belgian privacy regulators with analyzing the company’s terms and policies.”

In other words, if you so much as click on a link to a Facebook page-an event, business, brand or person’s page it installs “cookies” via your browser which has landed them on the wrong side of European privacy law.

So, I ask you again is Paul paranoid, or simply addressing the big, fat, black NSA SUV in the room?