On Dec. 18, President Barack Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies released a surprisingly critical report of the United States government’s intelligence practices since 9/11. The immediate reaction to the panel’s 300-plus-page report has rightly focused on its 46 recommendations for intelligence reform, such as ending the National Security Agency’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records that seeks to analyze the relationship networks of a minute number of counterterrorism targets. Yet it would be a mistake to pay attention only to the report’s particulars and ignore the very American civil libertarian philosophy animating the panel’s interpretation of what “security,” at its core, means.

The five-member group, comprising privacy, legal and national-security experts handpicked by the White House, does not simply conceive of security as national or homeland security. Rather, it passionately argues for a much richer, and more traditional, understanding of what security means to a free people, emphasizing the people’s Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The panel then immediately goes on to correctly equate security with freedom from governmental intrusion. “This form of security is a central component of the right to privacy,” it writes, “which Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously described as ‘the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.’”

Harbor no illusions: This conception of security as protection from government meddling is a total repudiation of what the U.S. intelligence apparatus has done since 9/11. Because of whistle-blower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures, we now know that the U.S. intelligence community systematically undermines and sabotages all people’s right to be left alone. On top of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls domestically and abroad, the NSA sifts through the content of email and text communications to and from the U.S., compels American technology companies to provide the personal data of their international customers without a warrant, hacks into the unencrypted data links between Internet companies’ servers overseas, injects vulnerabilities into global encryption standards, collects daily location data from billions of mobile devices worldwide, collected the records of Americans’ email and Internet usage until 2011, and on and on. (Full disclosure: I work for the American Civil Liberties Union, which provides legal representation for Snowden.)

The panel’s skepticism and civil libertarian streak even extend to that post-9/11 truism, always misguided if not downright malicious, that there must be a balancing act between national security and personal privacy. “The idea of ‘balancing’ has an important element of truth,” says the report, “but it is also inadequate and misleading.” The panel goes on to argue that certain forms of surveillance — such as those that restrict First Amendment rights of speech, religion and association, or that engage in industrial espionage — are always illegitimate, regardless of whether the spying is conducted domestically or abroad. The panel also confirms what Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., have argued all along: The NSA's call-records program, as constituted, violates Americans' civil liberties with no tangible security benefit. In other words, the American people were secretly subsidizing their own surveillance and the worldwide destruction of privacy without receiving anything in return.