But Wittes has so thoroughly accepted the assumptions of the national-security establishment that he doesn't even discern the newspaper article's implicit disapproval. As he sees it, massive secret spying with lax oversight and hoovering up the digital address books of millions isn't presumptively problematic. Hasn't the NSA assured us that this is all legal and that safeguards are in place? Haven't they explained that this is necessary to keep us safe? Why would anyone want to reveal this unless they just like exposing secrets as an end in itself? Trust the national-security state enough and its critics seem incomprehensible.

The revealing assumptions don't end there. "At the policy level, the entire story amounts to nothing more than the proposition that NSA is under 12333 collecting large volumes of live-stream data, storing it, and protecting U.S. person material within that data only through minimization requirements," Wittes writes. "We knew all of that already." Hold on. To whom is that "we" referring? The Lawfare brain trust may have read the article with a yawn. There is a tiny cadre of surveillance policy experts who know what 12333 is, understand the term "live-stream data," and possess an understanding of surveillance policy so sophisticated that no particular Snowden revelation comes as much of a surprise.

Newspaper articles are not published for those people. The vast majority of Washington Post readers have never studied surveillance policy or heard of 12333. If you told them that the NSA is "collecting large volumes of live-stream data, storing it, and protecting U.S. person material within that data only through minimization requirements," they wouldn't have the foggiest idea what that means. But if you told them, "the NSA is hoovering up hundreds of millions of email address books, including many belonging to Americans," they know much more than before. The Post didn't needlessly reveal a particular consistent with the public's general understanding of NSA practices—it improved public understanding of the NSA's approach to surveillance with a clarifying particular.

The public keeps being told that the NSA doesn't spy on Americans. What the Washington Post story clarifies, among other things, is that they're being misled. Hey Washington Post readers, the article effectively says, the Obama Administration's rhetoric may have led you to believe that as an American, you aren't subject to NSA spying. What probably isn't clear to you is the fact that lists of all the people many of you email with are being hoovered up and stored.

Did telling Americans the truth in this instance hurt national security?

Although Wittes assumes so, he doesn't argue the conclusion with any rigor. He assumes the efficacy of address-book collection and the need for doing it. Wittes nowhere grapples with the possibility that address-book collection is ineffective, whether due to inadequate oversight or because so much time and so many resources are spent collecting overwhelming amounts of information about totally innocent people. He doesn't grapple with the potential for abuse either, and when Wittes writes that "people can now frustrate" this collection method, he doesn't seem to realize or care that the vast majority will be innocents who don't want the government to have their address book and can now take steps to protect the privacy of their own data.