On Monday, August 10, 2026, Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, posted seven words about his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers (MI):

"Mike Rogers out here fighting for the Peeping Tom vote."

He added: "Creepy stuff, Mike."

He was reacting to a clip somebody had dug up from thirteen years ago. It is worth watching, because it is the cleanest statement of a philosophy Rogers spent his whole career acting on — and, as it turns out, getting paid for.

The sentence

The date was October 29, 2013. Rogers was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency were a few months old, and Congress was arguing over whether to rein in Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act — the provision the government had used to secretly hoover up phone records in bulk from Americans nobody suspected of anything.

Rogers was questioning Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University. His argument was that the program must be fine, because in ten years nobody had complained about it.

Vladeck pointed out the obvious problem. Here is the exchange:

Vladeck: "But who would be complaining?"

Rogers: "Somebody who's privacy was violated. You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated."

Vladeck didn't let it go: "I disagree with that. If a tree falls in the forest, it makes a noise whether you're there to see it or not."

Rogers' answer was to laugh it off. "Well that's a new interesting standard in the law," he said. "We're going to have this conversation… but we're going to have wine, because that's going to get a lot more interesting…"

Read the sentence again slowly, because it isn't a gaffe. It's a rule. A secret program can never violate anyone's rights, because the secrecy is what stops them from finding out. The better you hide it, the more legal it becomes.

That was the chairman of the committee whose entire job was overseeing the people doing the hiding.

It was his whole career, not one bad day

Rogers didn't say that once and move on.

He was one of the PATRIOT Act's leading champions from its introduction in 2001, and after Snowden he led the effort to stop the bulk collection powers from being cut back. In a joint statement with Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the committee's top Democrat, he said flatly:

"The charge that the program tramples on the privacy of citizens is simply wrong."

In 2012, he and Ruppersberger wrote CISPA — the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act — which would have let companies hand cybersecurity information, including personal data, to the government and the NSA while shielded from existing privacy law. The ACLU argued it would let the government collect large amounts of sensitive personal information with very few restrictions. It passed the House and died in the Senate.

He has softened the packaging since. Running against Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024, Rogers said it was "wrong" for the FBI to conduct warrantless searches of U.S. citizens' data. He did not call for repealing or blocking the authority that lets it happen.

Then he got paid

Here is the part that turns a bad quote into a real story.

After leaving Congress in 2015, Rogers sold the thing he'd been chairman of. He advised cybersecurity, intelligence and government-contracting firms. He became a senior security adviser at AT&T.

And from April 2018 to October 2024, he sat on a security advisory board at Telefónica, the Madrid-based telecom giant that operates across Latin America.

Michigan Advance went through his Senate financial disclosures and found what the seat paid him: $94,241. (What he earned from the board between 2018 and 2022 isn't public.)

In 2022, Telefónica published a transparency report about its own conduct. In Venezuela, where it operates as Telefónica Movistar, the company had spent 2021 intercepting its customers' communications at the request of Nicolás Maduro's security agencies.

The scale, according to the watchdog group Ve Sin Filtro:

• 1.5 million customers intercepted — more than 20% of Movistar's phone and internet lines in the country
• Calls tapped. Text messages monitored. Customers' phone locations handed to Venezuelan authorities. Internet traffic captured
• Requests came from the military, the public ministry, the main criminal investigation agency, police forces and a state security university
• Websites blocked and accounts hacked — including three human rights organizations and two VPN services people use to get around censorship

And the detail that matters most, given who was on the advisory board: Ve Sin Filtro found no evidence that any of it went through a judge. "Nowhere does it mention that the orders come from courts or come with the approval of judges, as they do in other countries," the group said.

Spain's El País and The Washington Post both reported on the disclosure. Venezuelan human rights defenders said the spying targeted opposition politicians and activists.

The people on the other end never knew

Put the two halves together.

In 2013, Mike Rogers told a law professor, in public, that a surveillance program cannot violate your privacy if you never find out about it.

Then he spent six years on the security advisory board of a company that was secretly tapping the calls of 1.5 million people, without judges, for a dictator — and those 1.5 million people did not find out until the company published a report about it a year later.

By Rogers' own 2013 standard, nothing happened to any of them. That is the standard. He said it out loud.

What he says about it

The Michigan Advance asked. Rogers' campaign said the January 2026 story was the first he had heard of any connection between Telefónica and the Maduro regime — even though the Post and El País had reported it years earlier. The campaign said his board work was really about defending the company's networks from China, and called the whole thing "fake news."

The Advance asked for a job description showing his role was limited to China. The offer letter the campaign provided says he would give "input, ideas and expert advice about Telefónica's security decisions as requested by the company from time to time." It does not say anything about China.

Spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet said Rogers believes any company that conspires with a criminal regime should be held accountable. Asked whether Rogers would denounce what Telefónica did, he hasn't.

He has had plenty to say about Maduro otherwise. When Trump had Maduro captured and extradited, Rogers put out a statement praising it and reminding everyone of his old job: "Bin Laden learned that lesson when I served as House Intel Chair."

So: loud about the dictator, silent about the company that helped him spy, and $94,241 better off.

Why this is a pattern and not an accident

This is the same move Michigan has watched him make before.

His fortune runs into the eight figures, and he has still been collecting a taxpayer-funded Michigan pension — $125,600 of it between 2022 and 2025. He tells voters he'll root out "every waste, every fraud" while taking $234,000 from donors with fraud cases of their own.

And on the specific question of whether power should be checked, he has already shown he'll switch sides when it suits him. In 2021 Rogers wrote that Trump's attempt to overturn the election was the behavior of a "third world dictatorship." Five years later, he says a van of ballots in Detroit stole his own 2024 race — and when the Detroit News asked his campaign for any evidence, nobody responded.

A man who called election lies dictator behavior, then told them. A man who took a dictator's telecom's money, then wouldn't criticize it.

This isn't a 2013 problem

The reason a thirteen-year-old clip is worth Michigan's attention in August 2026 is that the government is currently building the thing Rogers spent his career defending, much bigger.

Working with private firms like Palantir, the administration has assembled a surveillance dragnet stitching together AI facial recognition, license plate readers and phone location data — and pointed it at the mass deportation campaign and at people who protest. El-Sayed's AI platform, released in June, would ban the government from using AI for "warrantless surveillance" and bar "mass political surveillance, protected-characteristic predictive policing, or AI targeting of dissent."

Michigan is choosing between a candidate who wants warrants required, and a candidate whose stated position is that you have no grievance until somebody tells you what was done to you.

Journalist Spencer Ackerman, who spent the War on Terror years covering exactly this, put it plainly after Rogers' turn to election denial: he "was for impunity then and wants the same thing for himself."

The tree falls either way. Vladeck was right in 2013, and he's right now.

Source

"Fighting for the Peeping Tom Vote': El-Sayed Calls Out PATRIOT Act Champion Rogers Over Privacy" by Stephen Prager, Common Dreams, August 11, 2026. Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images.