Queries of telephone-call records require that the targeted number is connected to an international terrorist organization. The targeted numbers must meet a well-defined legal standard—that of reasonable, articulable suspicion—and may only then be used to uncover, through sophisticated data analysis, the network of numbers with which the target has been in contact over time. Privacy safeguards are administered by teams of national-security lawyers in multiple agencies, and the entire process is subject to both congressional oversight and review by the FISA court. When the court and Congress identified compliance issues, the NSA took them seriously, overhauling their systems and creating a new office of compliance to address them.

What, then, accounts for the public mistrust? Intelligence officials forget that the public sees none of this. Where the government sees three branches of government working together in harmony, the public sees a disturbing pattern of secret law and secret government accompanied by demands to “trust us, we are keeping you safe.” Secret checks and balances appear to be nothing more than a pale shadow of our constitutional design.

The FISA court may have reviewed the programs, but the public never got its day in court. The ACLU has challenged the constitutionality of NSA surveillance programs for years, but that case never got to the issue of constitutional rights. …