Throughout all the bombshell revelations this summer about U.S. government surveillance, President Barack Obama and top intelligence officials have insisted they welcome a public debate on the balance between security and privacy.

But in reality, they could not be trying much harder to stifle it.

Thanks to the bountiful leaks from Edward Snowden to The Guardian and other newspapers, the public is finally getting an accurate sense of the vast U.S. electronic surveillance regime that collects, connects and retains massive amounts of information about all of us — although government officials are asking us to believe that almost none of it ever gets looked at by anyone.

Far from being forthcoming, however, when administration representatives have made themselves available for questions, their answers have been defensive — often vague or overly narrow, misleading or plainly untruthful. In oversight hearings, they have attacked the leaks and the leaker, made unsubstantiated complaints about press coverage, misrepresented the concerns of privacy advocates and employed scare tactics.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has been one of the few members of Congress to complain about it, raising one subterfuge in particular: "After years of stonewalling on whether the government has ever tracked or planned to track the location of law-abiding Americans through their cellphones," he said in a statement last week, "once again, the intelligence leadership has decided to leave most of the real story secret — even when the truth would not compromise national security."

The president has charged two ostensibly independent commissions to report back to him on some possible reforms, but he has indicated he thinks the most that might be needed is some tweaks. "People may want to jigger slightly sort of the balance between the information that we can get versus the incremental encroachments on privacy that if haven't already taken place, might take place in a future administration, or as technologies develop further," Obama told reporters in August.

What the nation needs, however, is not reassurance from politicians about a few secret changes to covert programs. We need an accessible public discussion of what privacy means in this new era.

Americans have historically had a reasonable expectation that the government was not watching their every move. But the kind of ubiquitous surveillance that once required a massive application of manpower is now cheap, and will soon be effortless.

Thanks to the Snowden revelations, we now know that the government already sweeps up vast amounts of information about Americans, including "metadata" showing whom they talk to, and email, public and commercial information including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, transportation manifests and GPS-location data.

When you add all that up — even if the government stops short of actually listening in on your phone calls and reading your emails — there is basically no privacy left.

So the central questions posed by the Snowden revelations are these: Is there still a right to privacy in the modern age? And if so, how far does it extend?