It was when I was in college, if distant memory serves, that students were asked to submit exams not under their names but under Social Security numbers or student-identification numbers. The idea was that the professor could not discriminate against you because he or she did not know whose paper was being graded. To them, you were just a number and grading was a dry exercise of comparing answers to questions. Somehow, the same kind of anonymity that was impersonal and desirable in the context of exam-scoring has, in the context of impersonal surveillance, been warped into a deeply intrusive invasion of personal privacy.This can’t happen with the NSA program. It is nothing more than a bank of numbers. A huge bank, to be sure . . . just as the online telephone directories are huge databases. All the NSA program can tell the government, though, is if a number called or was called by another number, at what time, and for how long. It cannot tell them that you called another number — to figure that out, they need to take other, legally regulated steps extraneous to the program.

It is an absurd notion — but it does not seem absurd to most Americans because the “domestic spying” fiction has not been effectively rebutted. Though he often chooses to be toxic and divisive, President Obama is a gifted speaker. Think of the good that might have been done by one simple, unapologetic speech that explained the lengths to which the NSA has gone not to violate the privacy of Americans.

Or maybe not. The “domestic spying” fears have a resonance they would not otherwise have because the Obama administration abuses its powers. It has an undeniable track record of using the IRS, the Justice Department, and other federal agencies to persecute political opponents. While serving as Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee by acclamation, even threatened to use “old fashioned techniques of peer-pressure and shaming” in order to suppress constitutionally protected speech disfavored by the administration.

The public does not trust this government to refrain from abusing its powers.