Grope through the Styrofoam pellets of rhetoric that surround the 46 recommendations in the report issued last week by the president's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, and you will discover that the authors "have not uncovered any official efforts to suppress dissent or any intent to intrude into people's private lives without legal justification." The panel's investigation of the National Security Agency found—as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found before them—that the occasional unintentional violations of guidelines were stopped once they were detected.

Yet...