As US embassies remain closed across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia in response to a reported terror threat, critics are blasting politicians for exploiting recent State Department warnings to build the case that vast NSA spying is a necessary protection. 

Critics slam the cynical attempt to play to people’s fears to silence debate over widely unpopular NSA spying programs and beef up US military presence across the world. The legitimacy of the data revealing the alleged terror plot is not broadly coming under question, but the way it is being used to build the political agenda of expanding the US security and surveillance state is being hotly contested.

While the media widely reported Monday that the latest terror alert was spurred by intercepted communication between Al Qaeda leaders and Yemeni organizations, it is not clear how much of, or whether, this information was intercepted by the vast NSA surveillance dragnet. Nonetheless, several politicians—many of them long-time war hawks—are clamoring to tell the press that the alleged interception of a terror plot shows that NSA spying saves lives.

“These [NSA] programs are controversial. We understand that,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Georg.) told NBC‘s Meet the Press on Sunday, the Guardian reports. “But they are also very important… If we did not have these programs, then we simply would not be able to listen in on the bad guys.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) declared Sunday to CNN: “The NSA program is proving its worth yet again.”

Reps. C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger (R-Mar.) and Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) were also quick to trumpet the virtues of NSA spying to the media, with Ruppersberger declaring to ABC, “[The] good news is that we picked up intelligence. That’s what the NSA does.”